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Centennial Address 

DELIVERED JUNE 14, 1876 

BY 

E>6e Hon. Hugh Blair Grigsby 



DISCOURSE 



ON THE 



LIVES AND CHARACTERS 



OF THE 



EARLY PRESIDENTS 
and TRUSTEES 

OF 

HAMPDEN-SIDNEY 
COLLEGE 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENARY OF THE FOUNDING OF THE 
COLLEGE, ON THE 14th DAY OF JUNE, 1876 



BY 

HUGH BLAIR GRIGSBY, LL. D. 

>> 

PRESIDENT OF THE VIRGINIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY 

AND CHANCELLOR OF THE COLLEGE 

OF WILLIAM AND MARY 






RICHMOND: 

THE HERMITAGE PRESS 

1913 



11 ^ S& 



v %^ 



PATRONS OF THIS WORK 



Samuel B. Dabney, Houston, Texas 
James C. Tait, Norfolk, Virginia 
Charles B. Alexander, New York 
Joseph A. Smith, Murfreesboro, Tennessee 
Clement C. Gaines, Poughkeepsie, New York 
A. B. Carrington, Danville, Virginia 
Fairfax Harrison, Chicago 
Henry C. Rice, Blackstone, Virginia 
Thornton R. Sampson, Austin, Texas 
Eugene C. Caldwell, Austin, Texas 
Cleland B. Welton, Moorefield, West Virginia 
W. H. T. Squires, Norfolk, Virginia 
Thomas C. Johnson, Richmond, Virginia 
William H. Whiting, Jr., Hampden-Sidney 
Alfred J. Morrison, Hampden-Sidney 
J. H. C. Bagby, Hampden-Sidney 
Hampden-Sidney College 



* Gift 






Ill 



Si aut vos prioribus saeculis aut Mi 
quos miramur his nati essent, ac deus 
aliquis vitas ac tempora vestra repente 
mutasset, nee voMs summa ilia laus et 
gloria in eloquentia * * * defuis- 
set. Tacitus: Dialogus de oratoribus. 
41. 



CHARTER TRUSTEES 

The Eev. John Blair Smith, Patrick Henry, 
William Cabell, senior, Paul Carrington, Eobert 
Lawson, James Madison, John Nash, Nathaniel 
Venable, Everard Meade, Joel Watkins, James 
Venable, Francis Watkins, John Morton, William 
Morton, Thomas Eeade, William Booker, Thomas 
Scott, senior, James Allen, Charles Allen, Samuel 
Woodson Yenable, Joseph Parkes, Eichard Fos- 
ter, Peter Johnston, the Eev. Eichard Sankey, 
the Eev. John Todd, the Eev. David Eice, and 
the Eev. Archibald McEobert. 



IV 



CALENDAR. 

1772 — First attempt by Presbytery of Hanover to establish the 
College. 

1774. Oct. 13 — Presbytery "gladly concurs to establish a Seminary 
in Prince Edward/' 

1775. Feb. 1, 2, 3 — £1,300 subscribed, chiefly in the counties of 
Charlotte, Prince Edward, and Cumberland: Presbytery con- 
siders how it would be most proper to lay out the money; 
Trustees nominated. Peter Johnston makes gift of 100 acres 
of land for a site : Samuel Stanhope Smith chosen Eector of 
the Academy. 

1776. Sept. 26 — First recorded meeting of the Board of Trustees. 
1776. Dec. 18 — "Mr. President and his assistant teachers have 

divided the money for the present year for schooling.'" 

1779. John Blair Smith chosen Eector of the Academy. 

1783 : May. Charter granted : An act for incorporating the Trus- 
tees of Hampden- Sydney, (ILemng's Statutes at Large, XI, 272- 
275), John Blair Smith, Patrick Henry, &c, &c, "hereby con- 
stituted a body politic and corporate, by the name of the presi- 
dent and trustees of Hampden- Sydney College, who shall have 
perpetual succession and a common seal." 

1789-1796 — Drury Lacy, Vice-President, in charge. 

1797-1806— Archibald Alexander, President. 

1807-1820— Moses Hoge, President. 

1821-1835 — Jonathan P. Cushing, President. 

1835-1838— Daniel L. Carroll, President. 

1838-1844— William Maxwell, President. 

1845-1847 — Patrick J. Sparrow, President. 

1849-1856— Lewis W. Green, President. 

1857-1876— John M. P. Atkinson, President (continuing until 
1883). 



V 



HUGH BLAIR GRIGSBY. 

Hugh Blair Grigsby was born in the city of Norfolk, Virginia, 
November 22, 1806, and died at his place, "Edgehill," Charlotte 
county, Virginia, April 28, 1881. He was the son of Benjamin 
Grigsby, who was born in Orange county in 1770, and was a pupil 
of William Graham at Liberty Hall Academy, the germ of the 
present Washington and Lee University. Among Benjamin Grigs- 
by ? s fellow-students was Archibald Alexander ; and he and Alexander 
were companions when in early manhood they sought their life- 
work in Southside Virginia, riding horseback from the Valley. 
Leaving Alexander at Petersburg, Grigsby, "with his sole personal 
possessions in a pair of saddle-bags," continued his ride to Norfolk. 
Here he became the first pastor of the first Presbyterian Church in 
the Borough. He married Elizabeth, daughter of Hugh and Lilias 
(Blair) McPherson, and faithfully labored until, as is recorded on 
the marble obelisk erected to his memory in Trinity Churchyard, 
Portsmouth, Virginia, "in the faithful discharge of his calling, he 
fell a martyr to yellow fever on the 6th of October, 1810." His 
widow married secondly, in 1817, Dr. Nathan Colgate Whitehead, 
for twenty-seven years president of the Farmers Bank of Virginia, 
in Norfolk. 

As a boy, Hugh Blair Grigsby was delicate, and it was not sup- 
posed that he would live very long. He was early placed at school 
in Prince Edward county, where he learned to know several of the 
men of whom he has given an account in the following pages. For 
two years he was a student at Yale, taking work in law at the same 
time, with a view to making it his profession. He was obliged to 
give up the law because of a deafness that grew upon him. Going 
into journalism, he became the owner and editor of the Norfolk 
Beacon, upon which he was often wont to say he did the work of two 
or three persons much of the time during the six years that he con- 



VI 

ducted the newspaper. His severe application was rewarded with a 
competency of $60,000, with which he retired from the paper, his 
health still being uncertain. To build himself up, he went in for 
boxing and walking. It is noteworthy that he accomplished a jour- 
ney on foot to Massachusetts, thence through much of New England 
and the lower part of Canada, and back to Virginia.* In 1829-30 
(during the period of his editorial labors) he was a member of the 
House of Delegates of Virginia, and served in the famous Conven- 
tion. All this was very good discipline for a historian of Virginia. 
In 1840 Mr. Grigsby married Mary Venable, daughter of Colonel 
Clement Carrington, of "Edgehill," Charlotte county. Clement 
Carrington, son of Judge Paul Carrington, the elder, was a student 
at Hampden- Sidney in 1776, quitting his books to join the army in 
the command of Lieutenant- Colonel Lee. Clement Carrington, who 
died in 1847, aged eighty-five, was for many years a Trustee of 
Hampden- Sidney, and its benefactor. From the time of his mar- 
riage until the death of Colonel Carrington, Mr. Grigsby made his 
home in Charlotte county ; he then removed temporarily to Norfolk, 



*Dr. James W. Alexander met Mr. Grigsby in 1842. See his letter dated 
"Ingleside, Charlotte Co." [Forty Years' Familiar Letters. New York, 

1860. Vol. I, p. 352.] " is a Yale man, about as deaf as . 

Has an office built in the yard, lined with glazed cases, wherein 2,000 
volumes. As much of a litterateur as I ever saw. Was a member of the 
Virginia Convention in 1830. Thorough scholar in Greek, Latin, and 
French. Perfect health and athletic vigour. A boxer, in all the forms. 
As to diet and bathing, almost a Cornaro. Has not eaten warm bread 
for ten years. Shaves in his shirt in a cold room in winter. A pedes- 
trian; has walked all over Canada, and several times over New England. 
The last day of his return from Canada to Norfolk, he walked fifty-five 
miles, and was then at office business, on his feet, till ten at night. For 
this journey he trained, on Capt. Barclay's scheme; two meals a day, of 
rare beef and Madeira, and stale bread; this for three weeks. He has 
every sort of gymnastical contrivance. Always stands at study, with 
legs wide apart, and no support. He is an intimate friend of Upshur, 
Judge B. Tucker, and other ultra States Right men, to which party he 
belongs. I have met with nothing like him for knowledge of history, 
biography, heraldry, and the like. He is an eloquent talker. His father- 
in-law entered the army at 19 and was desperately wounded at the battle 
of Eutaw in 1781, being shot through the thigh, and bayonetted in the 
breast. Though he was years getting well, he is now, at 80, ruddy, erect 
on his horse, in good flesh, and has lost only one tooth. There are many 
such men here. This is owing to exercise and simple habits." 



VII 

but returned to "Edgehill," where he continued to reside until his 
death. Here he assembled a library of some six thousand volumes, 
and devoted himself to study and the affairs of his plantation. Of 
his farm operations, a friend and neighbor said : "In planning and 
executing improvements, constructing a dyke of some three miles 
in length, arranging the ditches of his extensive low grounds, so 
that a heavy rainfall could be easily disposed of, and bringing all into 
a high state of cultivation, he set an example of industry and energy 
which every farmer would do well to emulate. He had ample 
means, and we have sometimes heard his efforts characterized as 
fanciful or Utopian. But the result showed method and skill; the 
process was necessarily laborious, but the effect was grand." 

Very few Virginia planters have used their leisure to such advan- 
tage, and (the records not being searched) the Master of "Edgewood" 
affords the only parallel in the country at large. There has been 
preserved a manuscript volume, put together by G-rigsby in his 
eighteenth year — sketches of the character of certain public men of 
Virginia — showing how early was his bias for biography. His work 
was almost wholly biographical, the chief of it done during the last 
thirty years of his life : 

Address on the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, de- 
livered in the Athenaeum, Eichmond, Va., in 1848. [Incorporated 
in Convention of 1776. pp. 20-33.] 

Discourse on the Virginia Convention of 1829-30, before the Vir- 
ginia Historical Society, December 15, 1853. [Appearing in Vir- 
ginia Historical Reporter, Vol. I, 1854 ; also as a separate, Rich- 
mond. 1854. pp. 104.] 

Discourse on the Virginia Convention of 1776, delivered before 
the Phi Beta Kappa Society of the College of William and Mary, 
July 3, 1855. [Eichmond. 1855. pp. 206.] 

Discourse on the Virginia Convention of 1788, before the Virginia 
Historical Society, February 23, 1858. [Virginia Historical Col- 
lections, Vols. IX and X, 1890, 1891.] 

Discourse on the Character of Jefferson, at the unveiling of his 
statue in the library of the University of Virginia, 1860. 

Discourse on the Life and Character of Littleton "Waller Tazewell, 
before the Bar of Norfolk, Virginia, and the citizens generally, June 
29, 1860. [Norfolk. 1860. pp. 124.] 

Address, "Some of Our Past Historic Periods Bearing on the 



VIII 

Present," delivered before the Virginia Historical Society, March 
10, 1870. 

Address on the Founders of Washington College, Virginia, de- 
livered at Lexington, June 22, 1870. [Washington and Lee His- 
torical Papers, No. 2, 1890. pp. 104.] 

Centennial Address: Hampden- Sidney College, June 14, 1876. 

It is matter of speculation how much Mr. Grigsby would have 
accomplished in the way of the written word if he had not been a 
speaker in demand. However, he left other work besides that listed 
here ; his interests and attachments went far. The Hon. Eobert C. 
Winthrop, speaking from the chair at a meeting of the Massachu- 
setts Historical Society, remarked : "Of the qualities and accom- 
plishments of our deceased honorary member, Mr. Grigsby, of Vir- 
ginia, I hardly dare to speak, with the little preparation which it has 
been in my power to make. I trust that our friend, Dr. Deane, who 
knew him as well and valued him as highly as I did, will now, or 
hereafter, supply all my deficiencies, and place him on our records 
as he deserves to be placed. Indeed, he has placed himself there 
with no mistakable impress. No one of our honorary members on 
either side of the Atlantic has ever exhibited so warm a personal 
interest in our proceedings, or has so often favored us with, interest- 
ing letters, which have been gladly printed in our successive serials 
or volumes. 

a A Virginian of the Virginians, President .of their Historical 
Society, and Chancellor of their oldest College, bound to the Old 
Dominion by every tie of blood and of affection; proud of her his- 
tory, with which he was so familiar; proud of her great men, with 
so many of whom he had been personally associated in public as well 
as in private life ; sympathizing deeply in all of her political views 
and with all her recent trials and reverses, he was never blind to 
the great men and great deeds of New England, never indifferent 
to our own Massachusetts history in particular. For myself, I look 
back on more than twenty years of familiar and friendly correspond- 
ence with him — interrupted by the war, but renewed with the earliest 
return of peace — which was full of entertainment and instruction, 
and which I shall miss greatly as the years roll on, and as the habit 
and art of letter-writing is more and more lost in telegraphic and 
telephonic and postal card communication. There is hardly any- 
thing more interesting in all our seventeen volumes of Proceedings 



IX 

than his letter to me of March 30, 1866, beginning : 'Five j^ears and 
fourteen days have elapsed since I received a letter from you' — 
giving a vivid description of some of his personal experiences during 
the Civil War, and abounding in the kindest allusions to those from 
whom the war had so sadly separated him. I may not forget to 
mention that Horace Binney, of Philadelphia, though thirty years 
older than Mr. Grigsby, was a special correspondent of his, and that 
the last letter which Mr. Binney wrote before his death, at ninety- 
four, was to our lamented friend. 

"Mr. Grigsby, from an early period of his life, suffered severely 
from imperfect hearing — an infirmity which grew upon him year 
by year, until knowledge at one entrance seemed quite shut out. 
But he bore it patiently and heroically, and his books and his pen 
were an unfailing source of consolation and satisfaction. As a very 
young man, however, he had a seat in the great Constitutional Con- 
vention of Virginia in 1829-30, and was associated with all the con- 
spicuous men of that period. Meantime he was studying the char- 
acters and careers of the great Virginians of earlier periods, not a 
few of whom were still living. His 'Discourse on the Virginia Con- 
vention of 1776/ extended in print to a volume of more than two 
hundred pages, with its elaborate notes and appendix, is indeed as 
perfect a summary of the history of some of the great men of his 
native State — Jefferson and Madison and Patrick Henry and George 
Mason and others — as can easily be found. Many other publica- 
tions, both in prose and verse, have manifested the fertility of his 
mind, and the extent of his culture and research, while his letters 
alone would have occupied more than the leisure of any common 
man. 

"He was besides devoted to agricultural pursuits, planting and 
hoeing and ditching with his own hands, and prouder of his dyke, his 
'Julius Caesar Bridge/ and his crops, than of any other of his pro- 
ductions. His very last letter to me, dated not long before his ill- 
ness, concludes by saying : 'My employments for the past two weeks 
have been the reading of Justin, Suetonius, Tom Moore's Diary, and 
the building of a rail zigzag fence, nearly a mile long, to keep my 
neighbors' cattle off my premises.' In a previous paragraph, he said 
that he had just promised an invalid friend, who was anxious on 
the subject, to call soon and read to him 'the admirable sermon of 



X 

Paley on the Recognition of Friends in Another World.' That may 
perchance have been his last neighborly office." 

There has lived no man of Mr. Grigsby's tastes more intimately 
familiar with the history of Hampden- Sidney College, and it should 
be gratifying to many people, in and out of Virginia, that by the 
generosity of certain friends of the College, this address at its Cen- 
tennial celebration is now published.* 



*The material above has been drawn mainly from Mr. R. A. Brock's 
biographical sketch, in Vol. I, Virginia Convention of 1788. [Virginia 
Historical Collections, Vol. IX.] 



DISCOURSE 

Mr. Chairman, and Gentlemen of the Board of Trustees, Mr. Presi- 
dent and Gentlemen of the Faculty, Alumni of Hampden- 
Sidney, and Fellow Citizens: 

We have come to dwell upon the Past. We have assembled on 
this bright, centennial morning of June in the bowers of Hampden- 
Sidney, to clothe afresh for an instant these hills and this beautiful 
village with the trees of the primaeval forest, to mark the felling of 
each monarch of the wood and the letting in of the light of day on 
the virgin soil, to observe the progress of those humble tenements 
as they rose to receive their youthful guests, to follow the fortunes 
of the College from its beginnings to the present state, to dwell more 
especially upon the lives and services of the good and great men, 
whose names are inscribed on the roll of the charter, and who held 
before the young institution the aagis of their good will and au- 
thority ; and of those other good and great men who filled the chair 
of the presidency — in order that those who shall henceforth meet 
here as we now meet shall know not only who your benefactors were, 
but what they were ; reading as we pass along that mild and benefi- 
cent lesson, that those who aid in rearing and sustaining a literary 
institution for the diffusion of knowledge and religion among men 
long after their own ashes shall have mingled with the ancestral 
mould, found, unconsciously to themselves, a reputation as beloved, 
as honored, and as permanent as any that ever sprang from the field 
of battle or the councils of state ; and we have met, above all, to bow 
humbly and gratefully before the Giver of all Good, in acknowledg- 
ment of his tender and constant guardian care through the century 
that is past, and to invoke his blessings on the century to come. 

If I were to lean for a moment to that logic which rules in recent 
history, and which contemplates the immediate present as the direct 
and legitimate result of those primal causes which worked their 
way through the realms of a remote past to our own time, I might 
be justified in saying that the founder of your college was John 
Knox. That eminent man, who has lately been pronounced by one 



2 

of the greatest historians of the age to have been not a mere follower 
of Calvin, but in the battle of the Reformation and in the field of 
thought his equal, distinguished not only by those qualities which 
constitute a religious reformer, and by a valour that shrank from 
no human foe, but by the loftiest statesmanship ; as witness, his mem- 
orable bill to establish the school system of Scotland which he bore 
single handed and successfully through the Parliament against the 
machinations of the nobles and of the crown itself, thus laying the 
foundation of the greatness of his country. By the impress of his 
hand Presbyterianism and intelligence in the course of a generation 
became convertible terms, and on whatever distant shore the humblest 
Scotchman cast his lot he brought with him a knowledge of reading 
and writing, an understanding of the doctrines of the Christian 
faith, and a fidelity in peace and war that won in successive ages 
the unlimited confidence of France, of Sweden, of Prussia, and of 
other nations. But while such was the case of the common wanderer, 
the instruction of those who were designed for the learned pro- 
fessions was of a far higher order. It was the doctrine of Knox 
that the pulpit should always be filled by a scholar, and the student 
of theology was thoroughly drilled in Latin, and was instructed in 
the elements of Greek and Hebrew. Familiar from childhood with 
his Bible, the scholar in theology soon learned to consult the origi- 
nals of the sacred volume, and when he passed from the black hills 
of his native land by way of Ireland to Pennsylvania, or directly to 
Virginia, by the sea, he kindled a flame which was seen far and wide. 
As the tide of emigration from Pennsylvania to our own Valley 
poured in, it brought on its bosom not only the physical vigor to 
wrestle with the dangers and difficulties of the wilderness and the 
savage, but the force of a disciplined intellect, and a fervent devotion 
to knowledge and religion. Their first effort was to lay the founda- 
tion of the present Washington and Lee University on the other 
side of the mountain, and of Hampden- Sidney on this, both under 
the wing of the Presbytery of Hanover. William Graham, of old 
Scottish blood, was placed at the head of one, and Samuel Stanhope 
Smith, of the same race, at the head of the other. And it is due to 
departed worth and to the truth of history to declare that two more 
eminent men have rarely filled the chairs of a literary institution; 
and that of the presidents of Scottish blood who have presided in 
this College, and whose names will occur to all, five more eminent 



men cannot be found in the lists of any American institution. 
Samuel Stanhope Smith, John Blair Smith, Archibald Alexander, 
Moses Hoge, and William Maxwell speak for themselves now, and 
will speak forever.* 

THE MEN OF THE CHARTER. 

But let us dwell for a few moments on the men whose names are 
recorded in your Charter, most of whom had watched at the cradle 
of the Academy under the Presbyterian regime, who, as sponsors of 
the College, lent the influence of their names and the persuasive 
force of their example in aid of the young institution, who lived to 
behold the success of their efforts in its behalf, and who, as we look 
back upon them through the light and the cloud of a whole century 
of years, merit a grateful and lasting remembrance. And as this 
imposing array of men was drawn mainly from within an easy range 
of the College, we have a signal illustration of the worth of the 
generation which felled the forests of this region, which peopled 
the banks of your streams, and which shed abroad a moral, intel- 
lectual, and religious influence that has been felt in our own times. 

First in rank as in place on the roll of the Charter, as President 
of the College, stands John Blair Smith, (the son of a Scotch clergy- 
man), whose name will ever hold a high place in your history; but 
as we shall presently speak of him as the second President of Hamp- 
den-Sidney, we pass to the second name. And that name spoke for 
itself then, speaks now, and will speak forever, and though the fame 
of Patrick Henry swells far beyond the limits of a local institution, 
and must be assigned to the history of the nation, jet it is proper 
to say that, like John Blair Smith, he was the son of a Scotch 
teacher, that at the date of the Charter he lived a few miles only 
from the site of the College, that he was a frequent attendant of the 
Board of Trustees, that he was a benefactor of the library, which 
still possesses a French History of Switzerland which Henry re- 
ceived from Albert Gallatin, and which he gave to the College ; that 



*At this point Mr. Grigsby gave a few paragraphs to the origin of the 
College, and its history from 1776 to 1783, a period which has since been 
more closely investigated. [Vid., Calendar of Board Minutes: Hampden- 
Sidney College, 1776-1876. Richmond. Hermitage Press. 1912.] The 
essential facts in the early history of the College appear in the course 
of Mr. Grigsby's remarks. 



he placed his sons within your halls, that he remained a Trustee as 
long as he lived, and he still lives in your College, not indeed in his 
proper person, nor merely in his overshadowing fame, but in the 
person of a descendant, who not only bears his name and blood, and 
the moral and intellectual worth of his illustrious sire, but who 
occupies the place of his ancestor at your Board. 

The next is one of those names which in the preluding contest 
of a great crisis as well as during the positive crisis itself, looms in 
modern eyes beyond the stature of ordinary life, and savours rather 
of the mythic than the historic sera. But Colonel William Cabell, 
of Union Hill, was essentially a practical man, and on his magnifi- 
cent estate on the banks of the upper James was not only, in the 
wide sense of that word, a successful planter and the dispenser of a 
cordial and generous hospitality, but in the spirit of a wise states- 
manship foresaw that the public liberty could only be maintained 
by a diffusion of knowledge and religion among the people. Edu- 
cated under the auspices of his accomplished father, he appreciated 
the advantages of early education, and although a pupil of William 
and Mary College, and a member of the Church of England, as 
every member of the House of Burgesses must have been, he wisely 
judged at that early day that each of the grand geographical divi- 
sions of the State should possess the means of a high intellectual 
training, and he assented cheerfully to yield the influence of his 
name in behalf of Hampden- Sidney ; and the influence of the blood 
of Cabell has been felt on your destinies throughout the whole of 
the past century, and throbs in the veins of more than one of your 
Board of Trustees at this moment. Though a member of the 
Church of England, as has been stated, Cabell was liberal in his 
religious views, and there is a record of Presbytery that the body 
was to hold a called meeting at his house to protest against a 
measure of religious policy that attracted attention at the time. 
In 1798 this worthy patriarch went down to his grave. 

The next on the roll of Trustees is also one of those names which 
escape from the local historian into the wider realm of general 
history. As a youth he came over from Cumberland county to 
Lunenburg, studied law under Col. Clement Bead, was admitted to 
the bar at one and twenty, rose at once to business in Lunenburg, 
Halifax, Campbell, Prince Edward, and Cumberland, was sent at 
the date of the erection of Charlotte county as a representative to 



the House of Burgesses, voted with Patrick Henry and William 
Cabell on Henry's resolutions against the Stamp Act, was a mem- 
ber of all our early Conventions that transacted the business of 
legislation during the passage of the Colony to the Commonwealth, 
was with Henry and Cabell on the famous committee of the May 
Convention of 1776, which declared independence, and which re- 
ported to the House the first full Declaration of Eights and the 
first written constitution of a free Commonwealth known in human 
history, was with Henry and Cabell a member of the Virginia Fed- 
eral Convention of 1788, was a judge of the General Court and of 
the Court of Appeals, and from January, 1776, when he appeared 
before your Board to ask the privilege of building a house for the 
use of his sons during their college course, to his death on the 22d 
of June, 1818, was a member of your Board and a warm, active 
and 'most efficient friend of the College. Even in his extreme old 
age he attended the meetings of the Board, and it sometimes hap- 
pened that he might have been seen in your midst with his sons, 
Col. Clement Carrington and Judge Paul Carrington, on one hand, 
and his son-in-law, Samuel Woodson Venable, on the other. Nor 
did his influence cease with his life. For I think it may be affirmed 
that from the opening of the Academy in January, 1776, to the 
present moment there has hardly been an interval of time, however 
small, in the life of the College, during which either the honorable 
office of a Trustee, or of a Professor, or of a pupil, or of an active 
benefactor, has not been borne by some one bearing the name or 
the blood of Paul Carrington, the elder. 

The next in succession is the name of a soldier, a scholar, and a 
statesman, which was honored by our fathers and deserves the re- 
spect of their sons. The position of the name of Gen. Eobert Law- 
son between that of Paul Carrington and that of James Madison 
would shew of itself the estimation in which he was held by his 
contemporaries. Within a few weeks" of the opening of the Acad- 
emy, the progress of which he had watched closely, he was elected 
by the General Assembly Major of the 4th Virginia Eegiment, and 
in 1777, on the death of Colonel Isaac Eead in Philadelphia, where 
the Eegiment then was, succeeded that officer as Colonel of the 
Eegiment. Nor was the military career of General Lawson con- 
fined to the battlefields of the North. He was made a brigadier- 
general, and commanded a brigade under General Greene at the 






battle of Guilford. He was a member of the Assembly for several 
years, and in the memorable convention of 1788, was the colleague 
of Patrick Henry from the County of Prince Edward. He amused 
his vacant hours with literature and science, and the three volumes 
of Newton's Principia, which have held a place on your shelves for 
ninety-two years, were presented by him. He was a zealous friend 
of the College until his death in Eichmond in 1805. 

James Madison, the successor of Lawson on the roll of the Charter, 
bears a name which unites in finer proportions than any other of 
the sera in which he lived the wealth of statesmanship and the grace 
of letters; and though, like the names of Henry and Cabell and 
Carrington and Lawson, it moves in a broader sky than the horizon 
of a literary institution, yet ere we allow it to pass beyond our reach, 
a few fitting words were not out of place. As early as November, 
1775, James Madison was appointed, and his name remained on 
your rolls for more than three-score years, of which for more than 
half a century it held the first place. In one respect he differed 
from his three distinguished colleagues of whom we have spoken. 
Henry, Carrington and Lawson were among the working men of 
the Board. They not only aided the institution with their funds, 
and sent their sons to its humble halls, and sought the aid of legis- 
lation in its early struggles ; but they attended not infrequently the 
exhibitions of the students, presided at the examinations, and shared 
the trials and responsibilities of its administration. But Madison 
never attended a meeting of the Board, and it is even probable that, 
unless he may have dined at the Falls Plantation, or spent a night 
at Brandon, had never crossed that historic stream, which, heading 
in the Valley and rushing impetuously to the sea, separates two 
great divisions of the State as effectually as a chain of mountains 
or a wall of trap. And as he was appointed under the Presbyterial 
regime as well as by the Charter, he had not then any one of those 
titles of regard that adorn his name. When in 1775 the humble 
buildings of the Academy were emerging from the primaeval forest, 
Madison was only four and twenty, had not entered public life, and 
was only known to those who were familiar with the college life of 
Princeton, as one of the first scholars of the class of 1771, as a 
youth of pure morals, and, it was believed, of ardent piety, and 
enjoying the unlimited confidence of Witherspoon, of whom he 
was afterwards to become on the floor of the old Congress an active 



coadjutor, and who predicted for the modest boy an enduring fame. 
It was not until the first session of the first term of the Academy 
was nearly spent that Madison made the first mark of a brilliant 
record. When George Mason, in the May Convention of 1776, re- 
ported the original Declaration of Rights, which we now know was 
proposed by Patrick Henry, the last article contained the doctrine 
of toleration in its amplest form, and not of absolute religious free- 
dom. In a strict legislative view of the case the provision of Mason 
was wise and proper. He saw as a lawyer that the act establishing 
the Church was an ordinary act of Assembly, and could be repealed 
at any moment, and he no more reported a constitutional repeal of 
that act than of the acts establishing the right of primogeniture 
and the law of entails; but he foresaw that in the midst of a civil 
war, time might elapse before it would become practicable to revise 
the acts of Assembly, and he determined that until that revision 
was made, the rights of conscience should be protected by a con- 
stitutional provision. Madison, in the blush of youth, did not draw 
a distinction which was palpable to the clear head of Mason, and 
moved an amendment which placed the doctrine of religious free- 
dom on a broader basis, which ivas accepted by the House, and 
which formed the present fourteenth section of the Declaration of 
Eights. If William Watts and William Booker, on their return 
from the Convention to Prince Edward, told this fact to the mem- 
bers of Presbytery, these might as dissenters well have felicitated 
themselves on the confidence which they had placed in advance in 
the wisdom of Madison. But it was undoubtedly the associations 
connected with Princeton that led to the selection of Madison as a 
member of the Board. Samuel Stanhope Smith, John Blair Smith, 
Doak, Todd, and Wallace, were familiar with his college history, 
and were eager to enlist such a man in the cause of education. But 
whatever may have led to the selection, the name of Madison was 
for half a century nearly at the head of the roll ; for it was not until 
1820 that he resigned his seat at the Board. Of his long and re- 
splendent career in the public councils of the State and of the Union, 
of the unsullied purity of his life and character, of that profound 
scholarship which was eminent above that of all his contemporaries, 
with a single illustrious exception, and of those genial qualities of 
the head and of the heart which it was my fortune to observe in the 
patrimonial hall at Montpelier, hung with paintings and the trophies 



8 

of the past, in which he received his guests, or in the social circles of 
our metropolis, where in extreme old age but in the full possession 
of his great powers he performed his last service to his country, it is 
beyond our present province to speak; but we may recall the fact, 
as honorable alike to himself and to his native State, that from a 
period antecedent to his entrance on public life to that hour, forty 
years ago, when he was laid away in his final resting place beneath 
the oaks of Montpelier, his name was always connected either as a 
Trustee of Hampden- Sidney or as a Visitor of the University of 
Virginia, with the literary institutions of his beloved Common- 
wealth. 

But the fleeting minutes of this anniversary remind me that I 
must glance but for a moment at the names of the men of the 
Charter ; and I can only say of Nathaniel Venable that it was at his 
house was held on the first day of February, 1775, that meeting of 
Presbytery which fixed the present site of the College, that appointed 
Samuel Stanhope Smith Eector of the Academy, that granted per- 
mission to the united congregations of Prince Edward and Cumber- 
land to present a call to Mr. Smith, and laid down that wholesome 
and catholic doctrine that the object of rearing the Academy was 
the diffusion of knowledge; and that, though they would use the 
ordinary forms of the Presbyterian worship in the discipline of the 
College, they would bias the judgment of none, but leave all to 
worship God according to the forms most agreeable to them. Nor 
should one instance of the energetic devotion of Nathaniel Venable 
to the interests of the infant institution be passed over in silence. 
In the second year of its existence the currency of the country be- 
came seriously disordered, and the regular Steward of the College, 
fearful of immediate bankruptcy, deserted his post without giving 
a notice to the Board of Trustees, and an immediate dissolution of 
the Academy was imminent. In this emergency Nathaniel Venable, 
aided by James Allen, sen., and John Morton, came to the rescue, 
and with considerable loss to himself, supplied the students with 
food until the close of the session. Nor should we forget that 
legacy of descendants which Venable bequeathed to the Academy, 
and which has cherished it from its birth to the present hour. — And 
of John Nash, of Templeton, one of whose race fell in the second 
year of the College on the field of Germantown (and another of 
whom died in New York while a member of the old Congress), and 



whose name and blood have won distinction at the bar, in the pulpit, 
and on the bench of Virginia and North Carolina through the cen- 
tury that is gone, and are kindling fresh fires for the century to 
corne. — And of General Everard Meade, of Amelia, whose name 
may be read in the books he presented to the Academy, enriched 
by him also with other benefactions. — And of Colonel Joel Watkins, 
the ancestor of the Watkinses of Charlotte, who was ever ready to 
press the claims of the Academy on the floor of the General Assem- 
bly, whose sons and grandsons were among your pupils, and whose 
death at a ripe old age was honored by a graceful eulogy from the 
pen of John Eandolph. — And of his brother Francis Watkins, long 
the venerated Clerk of the courts of Prince Edward ; from its origin, 
the wise, active and munificent friend of the institution, whose 
venerable presence, which may be recalled by some now living, in- 
spired the purity and love which dwelt in his own bosom. — And of 
Colonel Thomas Eead, of Charlotte, another Clerk of a court — a 
class of men who for the most part sprung from the most intellectual 
families of the Colony and reared in the Secretary's office at Wil- 
liamsburg, from which they passed to the capital of each county at 
the date of its creation, were the most efficient authors of that civili- 
zation and refinement which were the characteristics of the ancient 
regime; Thomas Eead, who rallied his fellow-citizens en masse to 
march against Cornwallis; who as a member of the House of Bur- 
gesses and of the Conventions of 1776 and 1788, performed his duty 
faithfully to his country, and whose remains now rest near those of 
an only child beneath the hollies of "Ingleside" — And of Colonel 
William Morton of Charlotte, the son of Little Joe Morton, one of 
the patriarchal names of Charlotte, who in the space of two days 
made up a company of his neighbors and rushed to the relief of 
Greene; and beneath whose unerring aim on the field of Guilford, 
the gallant Col. Webster, who was called the eye of the army of 
Cornwallis, fell to rise no more. — And -of John Morton, the kinsman 
of William, whose ancestors with those of the Watkinses, arriving 
in the Colony at its first settlement, and moving westward from the 
sea in successive generations, surveyed the untrodden soil, felled the 
forests, built the school-houses, reared the churches, and laid the 
foundations of the social polity of the new region — a race which 
stood at the cradle of Hampden- Sidney, was present at her baptism, 
wiped the tears from her infant face, supplied her with wholesome 



10 

food, filled her halls with their offspring, guided her counsels through 
the dangers of the first century, and are ready to achieve for their 
patrimonial institution a still more glorious distinction for the cen- 
tury to come. — And of Thomas Scott, of a family of men who from 
the field of Braddock to our own time have been pre-eminent in war 
as well as in the walks of peace, and who believed that the only solid 
basis of a generous civilization was the large and liberal education 
of the people; whose names are recorded among your active and 
liberal Trustees (not less than three appearing at the same meeting 
of the Board and the name being still seen on the catalogues of the 
day). — And of William Booker, a member of the Convention of 
1776 and of the Assembly; of James and Charles Allen; of Joseph 
Parks; of Eichard Foster; of Peter Johnston; of the Eev. Eichard 
Sankey, who was one of the earliest friends of the Academy, aided 
it by his counsel during the Eevolution, and assisted in its organiza- 
tion under the Charter, was the presiding member of the Board 
whenever he was present, but in less than five years from the date 
of the Charter went down to his grave. — Of the Eev. John Todd, of 
Louisa, a graduate of Princeton, and the intimate friend of Madi- 
son ; and of the Eev. David Eice, who, although a most vigorous and 
cordial supporter of the College, bringing the full force of his elo- 
quence to its aid, removed two years after the date of the Charter 
to Kentucky, where he spent the remainder of a long and useful 
life. — And of the Eev. Archibald McEobert, who was educated at 
the University of Edinburgh, and coming over to the Colony as a 
clergyman of the Church of England, subsequently (after the end 
of the war) connected himself with the ministry of the Presbyterian 
church, and was settled as a pastor in this vicinity. Mr. McEobert 
usually presided in the Board of Trustees whenever present; from 
his lips, on a bright Sabbath morning of July, 1799, on the banks 
of the Staunton, in the presence of a vast concourse of people, fell 
the parting benediction to the dust of Patrick Henry. If the time 
permitted, I should delight to speak in detail of these good men and 
show the claims they possess to the gratitude of their country. I 
have traced their course from the record of the first meeting of the 
Board, day by day and year after year, until after the lapse of sixty 
years the last survivor disappeared, and I can affirm that they de- 
serve well of those generations which have reaped the precious re- 
wards of their unceasing toils and liberal contributions to the cause 



11 

of education. May their names ever live in the hearts of a grateful 
posterity, and the glory of another century shine on their honored 
graves ! 

As we contemplate the character of the men of the Charter, there 
presents itself a faithful and striking illustration of the worth of the 
early settlers of this part of Virginia. This was comparatively a 
new territory. Cumberland, the aid of which was indispensable to 
the existence of the College, which was also the residence of some 
of its most energetic Trustees, had been set apart from Goochland 
only twenty-seven years before; Prince Edward from Amelia only 
twenty-two years before ; and Charlotte from Lunenburg eleven years 
only; and many thousand acres of these three counties were held 
by non-residents, who would neither sell nor settle.* When we re- 
flect that a majority of the men of the Charter lived within a morn- 
ing's drive of the College, the most favorable opinion must be formed 
of the intelligence and moral culture of the people whose represen- 
tatives they were, a people whose assistance enabled them to accom- 
plish their beneficent purpose. And it is worth a passing remark, 
as a token of the character of the men of the Charter, that, as ac- 
cording to that instrument seven members made a lawful quorum, 
the president might have summoned a Board of six members every 
one of whom had been a member of the May Convention of 1776; 
for Henry, of Yenable's Ford — as yet the old patriarch had not 
moved to the classic abode of "Red Hill" — Cabell, of "Union Hill" ; 
Carrington, of "Mulberry Hill"; Madison, of "Montpelier" ; 
Thomas Read, of "Little Roanoke," and William Booker, of Appo- 
mattox, were members of that body whose singular glory it was to 
have framed the first Declaration of Rights and the first written 
constitution of a free commonwealth known in human history ; and 
if a single vacancy had occurred in this fraternity of honor, it might 
have been filled by calling in General Robert Lawson, who had been 
a member of the Convention of 1788, which ratified in behalf of 
Virginia the present federal constitution. 

Who were the successors of the original Board ? Who were those 



*There is little evidence on the Deed Books of Prince Edward county 
of any considerable absentee landlordship. Most of the residents of the 
county in 1776 were freeholders, and the average estate was of about 200 
acres. The county was a third larger in 1776 than it is now; the popu- 
lation has not greatly increased since then, certainly not since 1790. 



12 

who filled their places, as one by one, year after year, they passed 
away ? Who were those legal guardians who befriended the institu- 
tion, and bore it successfully upward and onward through the in- 
numerable impediments that thronged its path during that century 
which we this day commemorate? Liberal, high-minded, and dis- 
tinguished in every sphere of moral and intellectual accomplishment 
they assuredly were. But we must hurry onward, with the single 
remark that if every record of the people living within the range of 
your institution were by some extraordinary convulsion blotted from 
existence, and the names and virtues of the successive members of 
the Board of Trustees had by some singular fortune escaped the 
general wreck, the philosophical historian might reconstruct the past 
of the region, and demonstrate its claims to that generous civiliza- 
tion, that love of civil and religious liberty, which we know was so 
peculiarly its own. 

THE PRESIDENTS OF HAMPDEN-SIDNEY. 

But, however efficient in the administration of the secular affairs 
of the College a Board of Trustees may be, however dazzling the 
radiance which their united accomplishments and distinctive quali- 
ties cast upon it, composing in the public eye the praesidium et dulce 
decus, the guard and the gracious ornament of a literary institu- 
tion; yet, as the chief office of a college is to teach, so its true and 
distinctive and permanent glory must consist in the skill and ability 
of its professors, and in the success which has crowned their work. 
And as I take up the roll of the Presidents and professors of the 
College through the century of its existence, the reflection forces 
itself upon me (which all of us may wisely heed) that, so intimately 
is the past bound to the present, so rapidly do successive generations 
entwine with each other, and even centuries embrace one another, 
that I, who am somewhat within the earliest limit assigned by the 
Psalmist as the bound of human life, either knew, or might have 
known personally, with a single exception, every president of the 
College, and have mingled freely with the men who were present on 
that memorable morning when the Academy opened its doors for 
the reception of students; and when I consider the then remote 
position of your institution, and the uncertain and slender and ever- 
varying remuneration which the highest talents could derive from 
the professorial chair, I am struck by the array of the genius and 



: ,-J.i v. o^;, ■ V"*-" v S*Sif*''v»iv '- 



BsSKwassra 













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Samuel Stanhope Smith 



13 

accomplishments of those who have filled the seat of the presidency 
and of those who have aided them in their office. And here I ought 
to say, what I should have said before, that I speak not as an alum- 
mis of the College, or as a recipient of the slightest of its favors, nor 
as directly connected with that illustrious body of Christians who 
have inscribed on their Presbyterian banner not only the doctrines 
of a sound, religious faith and the obligations of the largest intel- 
lectual culture, but also the principles of civil and religious freedom 
in all their widest sense — I speak as the son of the common mother 
of us all, and as closely connected with that venerable college by the 
sea which educated some of the fathers and grandfathers and great- 
grandfathers of Hampden- Sidney, and whose highest office I hold, 
and who through me sends this day a centennial blessing to her 
younger sister ; and I must add that my testimony must be regarded 
as free from the bias of sect or party, to be taken only for what it is 
worth. 

SAMUEL STANHOPE SMITH. 

First on the list of presidents stands the name of him who, if the 
singular honor may be awarded to any one man, was the Father of 
Hampden-Sidney — Samuel Stanhope Smith. He was born in Lan- 
caster county, Pennsylvania, on the 16th of March, 1750, and was 
the son of the Eev. Eobert Smith, who, though born in Ireland, be- 
longed to that Anglo-Celtic race which passed from Scotland to that 
country at a remarkable epoch, and which during the first half of 
the last century sent a delegation of its members to the New World ; 
his mother, whose peculiar virtues he inherited, was Elizabeth Blair, 
of the blood of that venerable man who in 1693 received from King 
William and Queen Mary the charter of the college which bears their 
names, a college which has educated the youth of Virginia for nearly 
two centuries, and which on this centennial morning utters through 
me words of gratulation and cheer to her beauteous sister of Southside 
Virginia. Young Smith studied under his eminent father, was well 
instructed in the Latin language (which he spoke readily and wrote 
with some degree of elegance to his dying day), and less thoroughly 
in Greek, which at that day had hardly made much progress even in 
the University of Edinburgh ; and entering the College of New Jer- 
sey graduated in 1769, and was immediately promoted to the office 
of tutor. Here as a student and tutor he formed with Caleb Wal- 
lace and James Madison an intimacy which had a material influence 



14 

in bringing about the event we have met to commemorate. Let me 
for a moment recall the memory of Caleb Wallace. He was one of 
the first Trustees of the Academy, and was one of the prominent 
men of the aera in which he lived. Born at Cub Creek, in the county 
of Charlotte, he entered the College of New Jersey, graduated in 
1770, was the college mate and intimate friend of James Madison, 
studied theology, settled at Cub Creek, and was a member of Pres- 
bytery at Cub Creek on the 14th of October, 1774, when it was pro- 
posed for the first time to establish an academy in the region of 
the Southside. He saw and appreciated the merits of Stanhope 
Smith, whom he had known at Princeton, and exerted his influence 
in placing him at the head of the school. But in less than two years 
after the establishment of the institution, Wallace removed to Ken- 
tucky, where under the exigencies of a new country he studied law, 
became eminent at the bar, and when Kentucky was set off from 
Virginia was appointed a Justice of the Supreme Court of the new 
commonwealth. And here we may mention the fact that when Wal- 
lace, the two Smiths, and the Eev. Mr. Todd, of Louisa (who had 
taken his degree at Princeton eleven years before Madison took his, 
who resided within a short distance of Montpelier, and under whose 
advisement Madison had entered Nassau Hall), inscribed the name 
of Madison among the Presbyterial Trustees, they deemed it not im- 
probable that he would not only accept the office, but might enter 
the ministry of the Presbyterian church. His long residence and 
pure life at Princeton, his devotion to Witherspoon, the pious strain 
of his early correspondence, and his abhorrence of religious perse- 
cution, lead us to believe that his intimate personal and literary 
friends were not wide of the mark in their estimate of his religious 
character. But in three months after the opening of the College, 
Madison was sent from Orange to the May Convention of 1776; and 
from that date forward his whole attention was devoted either 'in 
the Assembly or in the old Congress to public affairs. 

When in 1773 Mr. Smith, as a missionary, visited Virginia, he 
appeared under flattering auspices. His imposing person, which 
even in extreme old age arrested the attention of the observer, his 
graceful address, his elegant scholarship, and above all his ready and 
brilliant eloquence, and the zeal which he displayed in the cause of 
letters, fascinated the people. Those who heard him only in his 
latter years, admirable as he was till stricken by an incurable dis- 



15 

ease, may have heard with some incredulity the reports which de- 
scribed the eloquence of the young preacher, when at the age of 
twenty-three he ministered to the churches of Cumberland and 
Prince Edward. Old men who had heard Samuel Davies during 
his flying trip to those counties, and to Charlotte, declared that since 
the days of Davies no such preaching had been heard in the South- 
side, and likened the youthful orator to Patrick Henry, whom they 
were wont to hear every court day in the old Courthouse not far from 
this spot. For as yet the splendid eloquence of James Innes, whose 
honored descendants are now within the sound of my voice, had not 
then been hear4 in the Capitol. It was owing to the magical in- 
fluence of Smith, which was felt by all alike, that the Academy was 
not only called into being, but that the buildings on the first day of a 
midwinter session were filled with such a crowd of students that it 
was difficult to accommodate them. 

But within five months of the opening of the College came the 
Virginia Declaration of Independence on the 15th day of May, which 
was followed by the Declaration of the Fourth of the following 
July, and war with its disastrous force fell upon the College. The 
students were soon called into the field; the currency became such 
that it was dangerous alike to receive or to hold it ; and the health of 
Mr. Smith, always delicate, had received a shock from a hemorrhage 
of the lungs; and in 1779 he resigned the office of Eector, as the 
presidency was sometimes called. He was then in his 29th year, 
and invalid as he was, he little dreamed of the long and honored 
career which he was yet to run. As he immediately accepted the 
chair of Moral Philosophy in the College of New Jersey, it is not 
improbable that one of the causes of his resignation was an inade- 
quate support. Though on his retirement from the chair of the 
Rector in 1779 he passes from our proper sphere, it may not be in- 
appropriate to say that he performed the duties of the chair of Moral 
Philosophy in the College of New Jersey with great ability, that he 
substantially rebuilt that institution, that he succeeded Dr. Wither- 
spoon as president and professor of Theology, that his discursive 
genius ranged through many provinces, religious, moral, and philo- 
sophical, as witness, especially a tract on the complexion of the hu- 
man species which was received with respect abroad as well as at home, 



16 

and may be read with interest in our own day.* He retained to the 
last that venerable presence which made him a grand figure in the ju- 
dicatories of the church, and those various and vigorous powers which 
were so effective in his prime. He died in Princeton in 1819 at the 
age of seventy, and was buried by the side of his predecessors in the 
presidency of the College of New Jersey. 

JOHN BLAIR SMITH. 

Samuel Stanhope Smith was succeeded by a brother, five years 
younger than himself, who had passed through the same domestic 
training, and who had graduated in the College of New Jersey, in 
the class of 1773 — a famous class, numbering Bard, and Dunlap, and 
William Graham, and Henry Lee, of the Legion, and Morgan Lewis, 
and Aaron Ogden, one of the proudest names of the post-Revolu- 
tionary bar of the North. John Blair Smith came to Virginia in 
1775, was a tutor in the Academy at its opening in 1776, studied 
theology under the supervision of his brother, was admitted to the 
ministry in 1779, and installed by Presbytery the same year in the 
churches of Cumberland and Briary, and was chosen Rector of the 
Academy as the successor of his brother. The weight of an official 
mantle is sometimes oppressive to the shoulders of a successor; but 
though John Blair Smith was only twenty-four years old, and was 
called to succeed the most eloquent preacher then living in the State, 
there was no pause in the public confidence. The scholar was re- 
minded of the praise bestowed by the quaint Camden on the accession 
of a distinguished son of an illustrious father to the British throne : 
Sol occubuit sed nulla nox secuta est. Probably in a greater degree 
than his brother was he qualified to grapple with the difficulties of 
that early day. For some years to come war and peace were to 
alternate with each other. Belonging to a religious sect which, ac- 
cording to Gibbon, first taught the doctrine that arms might be used 
in defence of religious freedom, he was not averse from the dangers 
of the field. While yet a Tutor, he had marched from Prince Ed- 
ward to Williamsburg at the head of a company of sixty students, 
with his college mate (and fellow tutor), David Witherspoon, as his 
lieutenant, and Samuel Woodson Venable as his ensign, and had 

*An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion in the Human 
Species. To which are added Strictures on Lord Karnes's Discourse on 
the Original Diversity of Mankind. Philadelphia, 1787 and 1810. Edin- 
burgh. 1788. [pp. 217.1 




John Blair Smith. 



17 

received the thanks of the Governor for his promptness in hastening 
to the support of the Capitol. But he was to encounter difficulties 
quite as formidable to a literary institution as the force of arms — a 
disordered currency, uncertain resources of agricultural labor, and 
military drafts upon those who would otherwise have attended the 
Academy. 

In May, 1783, on the passage of the Charter of the College, he 
drew, as the first president of the institution, an elaborate schedule 
of the regulations and studies adapted to the new state of things, 
which was accepted by the Board. One of his chief public efforts, 
beyond the range of the College, was his speech as a delegate of Han- 
over Presbytery, before a committee of the House of Delegates, in 
opposition to the bill laying an assessment for the support of re- 
ligion. That he spoke with great force and eloquence we know from 
Alexander White, one of the prominent statesmen of that a?ra, and 
a member of the House, who affirmed that Smith performed his 
part with great ability ; he is entitled to a liberal share of whatever 
credit is due for the defeat of the measure. It may be worth noting 
that in his view of the assessment bill Smith differed from his class 
mate, William Graham, who had been appointed by the Presbytery 
Eector of Liberty Hall Academy, who had also become a minister of 
the Presbyterian Church, and who, like Smith, as a captain of a 
company, had engaged in the war. Graham looked upon the assess- 
ment bill in a very different light from that in which Smith regarded 
it. Graham looked at the subject, not with the eye of a churchman 
or of a dissenter, but in the light of a wide and liberal statesmanship, 
and approved the policy which led Eichard Henry Lee and Patrick 
Henry to bring forward the bill. Those true patriots foresaw what 
we now know, that "at the beginning of the Bevolution the estab- 
lished church had ninety-one clergymen officiating in one hundred 
and sixty-four churches and chapels,, and that at its close only 
twenty-eight ministers were found laboring in the less desolate par- 
ishes," and that even if the Episcopal pulpits had been full, and the 
whole force of the other denominations been spent in preaching the 
gospel, there would be numerous neighborhoods and extensive regions 
of country in which the voice of the preacher would never be heard, 
nor the common offices of religion performed. The bill proposed 
to lay a small tax, which each payee might assign to what denomina- 
tion he pleased; and it was hoped that by the aid of such a fund, 



18 

some form of Christian worship might be maintained throughout the 
Commonwealth. But the bill failed to obtain the assent of the 
Assembly, and the foresight of Lee and Henry was sadly verified. 
No new churches were reared, and those previously existing fell to 
ruins; and through vast ranges of the State no sermon was ever 
preached, and no baptism performed ; and then came the tornado of 
infidelity which under the wings of the French Eevolution swept the 
State almost without resistance. Graham anticipated the results 
of the rejection of the bill, and was ready, in a political view, to risk 
any theological loss when there was at stake the moral and religious 
culture of a whole people. Smith closed his eyes to all other con- 
siderations than those which might concern the particular sect to 
which he belonged. Graham was a man of genius and worked out 
in the shadow of the North Mountain a metaphysical system of his 
own which he expounded to his pupils. Smith was a man of talents, 
and explained with great skill the text books which he had studied 
under Witherspoon. And it may be mentioned, as another exempli- 
fication of the diverse characters of these two great teachers, who 
were born in the same colony, who were sprung from the same stock, 
who were classmates at the same institution, who were qualified to 
tread with honor every path of peace or war, and who were placed 
by the Presbytery of Hanover in similar literary positions, that, 
while almost the entire population of Southside Virginia opposed 
the ratification by Virginia of the present Federal constitution, 
Smith gave that instrument his countenance and active support; 
and that while almost the whole Scotch-Irish people of the Valley 
approved that paper, Graham put forth all his powers in opposing 
its ratification. 

When John Blair Smith entered the pulpit he displayed in his 
earliest ministrations the qualities of a fair speaker and a close 
thinker ; but his audience held in vivid recollection the glowing per- 
formances of his elder brother, whose eloquence enchanted whole 
assemblies, and had built up in the forests of Prince Edward the 
most flourishing literary institution of that day. A shade of dis- 
appointment fell on John Blair Smith's early efforts. But in the 
course of five or six years it was seen that notwithstanding his duties 
as a teacher, which he faithfully performed, he had become one of 
the most powerful preachers of his time. 

If any one religious event in this part of the country deserves a 



19 

record in the secular history of the State, it was the revival during 
the years 1786-88 in the church at Briary and its associate congrega- 
tions. A minute account of the accessions to the Presbyterian 
church at that time may yet be read in a small printed tract of a 
few pages which has fortunately come down to us; and it will be 
there seen that the men and women who then received their re- 
ligious impressions were the ancestors of those who for near ninety 
years past have taken a leading part in the various religious denomi- 
nations, and in the moral and literary efforts of this entire region 
of country. The distinctive character of the people of Cumberland, 
Prince Edward, Charlotte, and their adjoining counties, such as it 
was before the late Civil War, may be traced to that Eera. And 
that revival, humanly speaking, was the work of John Blair Smith. 
I have heard certain aged men and women, whom Providence has 
spared to our time, speak with tears of the labors of Smith at that 
eventful period, giving neither sleep to his eyes nor slumber to 
his eyelids; and they likened him to an apostle wrestling with the 
powers of Darkness, and coming out conqueror over them all. 

One of the results of his preaching during his Briary campaign 
was that he was taught wherein his strength lay, and henceforward 
he sought the reputation rather of the great evangelist than of the 
great professor, and devoted most of his time to the large flock of 
which he was pastor. He finally determined to move from the 
College grounds, continuing to teach the Senior classes; a vice- 
president to have immediate charge of the College. Meantime he 
resided on a small estate of his own, which was not far from the 
institution. In 1791 he accepted a call to the Third Presbyterian 
(Pine Street) Church of Philadelphia, and left Prince Edward, 
after a collegiate and pastoral term of twelve years. It may be 
fitly added that he was a most able and most popular minister in 
his new abode; that after three years of arduous labors his health, 
which was always delicate, gave way"; that he accepted the presi- 
dency of Union College, New York; that upon a recovery of his 
health, he again returned to his charge in Philadelphia, where in 
1799 he fell a victim, in the forty-fourth year of his age, to the 
yellow fever which swept that city in the fall of that year. 

Nor is it uninteresting to know, that while residing in Virginia, 
he married a daughter of Col. John Nash, of "Templeton," Prince 
Edward county, and left descendants, two of whom fell in the dis- 



20 

charge of their duty in the late Civil War.* In person John Blair 
Smith was tall and spare, and was rarely in robust health; yet in 
the school and in the pulpit he performed labors which would have 
tasked the capacity of the strongest men. In all his works appeared 
what Buchanan called the perfervidum ingenium Scotorum, which 
impelled him to reach the highest point in every pursuit. Although 
cut down in the vigor of manhood, he was one of the most cele- 
brated preachers of his generation. His fame rests on no uncertain 
tradition. jSTo one knew him more intimately than Dr. Hoge, or 
was more capable of estimating his distinguished worth ; and Hoge, 
when in his old age he was recalling the eminent divines whom he 
had known, said of him "that a preacher possessing every minis- 
terial qualification in a degree so eminent, he had never known." 
Such was the first president of Hampden- Sidney College under the 
Charter. 

DRURY LACY. 

Allusion has already been made to the appointment of a vice- 
president to reside on the College grounds, on the removal of 
President John Blair Smith to a separate establishment of his own. 
The choice fell upon a young Virginian who had entered his thir- 
tieth year, and who had recently been appointed a Tutor in the 
English and Mathematical department of the institution. Drury 
Lacy was the first member of the faculty who had not passed 
through a regular college course. He was born in the county of 
Chesterfield in 1758, in his twelfth year lost his left hand by the 
bursting of a gun, and managed in spite of many obstacles to obtain 
an English education; had been a teacher in the family of Daniel 
Allen, of Cumberland, and Col. Nash, of Prince Edward, and 
although not a student of the College, had studied Latin under 
President Smith. His physical qualities tended no little to' his 
success in life. Above six feet in height, his form a model of the 
human figure, a dark stern gray eye, and a skin whose olive tints 
told of his descent from a Norman ancestry, and may still be seen 
in his descendants; with a self-possession not readily ruffled, and 
withal, of a pleasing address, and ardently devoted to the duties of 
his station, he made a favorable impression upon all who approached 



*General Charles Ferguson Smith, U. S. A. [1807-1862], was a grandson 
of President Smith. 



21 

him. As he walked along, you might suppose him to be a knight 
who had just descended from the saddle to take his seat in the 
council. 

In 1787 he appeared before Hanover Presbytery, and on that 
occasion read an exegesis in Latin which showed his familiarity 
with that tongue, and at the succeeding session of the body was 
licensed to preach. He bore a part in the revival at Briary, and 
soon exhibited those peculiar traits which were characteristic of his 
oratory. His stately form, a voice whose silver tones could be heard 
not only in the humble churches of that day, but over fields and 
forests in which hundreds were gathered to listen to his sermons; 
this, with a bold, impetuous speech that burst unconsciously from his 
lips, explain the results of his eloquence that tradition delights to 
dwell upon. But it is as an officer of the College that he claims 
our attention ; and it is said that he was not only an efficient teacher, 
but was remarkable in winning the affections of his pupils. In 1796 
he resigned his charge, and spent the remainder of his life as the 
pastor of a neighboring congregation, or as a teacher. 

It was in the capacity of the principal of a classical school which 
he conducted under his own roof until the day of his death in 1815, 
that he rendered most valuable service to his country. His pupils 
came from a distance, and lived in his family or at the house of 
some one of his neighbors. I was one of those pupils and bear my 
testimony to his thorough teaching of the Latin tongue. Though 
sixty-one years have passed since I was under his care, I feel the 
influence of his teaching on my mind and character at this moment, 
pointing the very thought which I am now pressing upon you. It 
is not unnatural at the present day, when the noble science of com- 
parative philology has shed such a dazzling and instructive splendor 
upon the elements of language, that some of the young generation 
should be inclined to undervalue the knowledge and skill in the 
Latin and Greek tongues possessed by our fathers. But such a 
notion is equally at war with philosophy and justice. Xenophon 
and Cicero were not only the most eminent writers, but the most 
expert philologers of their respective asras. Both of them were 
fond of derivations, especially in their moral disquisitions, and 
Cicero, more particularly in his moral and philosophical tracts, was 
prompt to draw an illustration for the case in hand from the root 
of a word, whenever the occasion offered. Now as our own language 



22 

rests on an Anglo-Saxon base, so it has been shown in recent times 
that the Greek rests on a Pelasgian and the Latin on an Etruscan 
base. But it is evident that neither Xenophon nor Gicero was con- 
scious of this discovery of the present century, that they never pene- 
trated beneath the upper crusts of their respective languages, and 
that the meaning of those languages might have been learned as 
certainly at the beginning of this College in 1776 as at this moment. 
We are justified, then, in saying that the Smiths and Lacy and 
Alexander and Hoge, who thoroughly understood the structure of 
the learned tongues, taught their pupils to understand Xenophon 
and Cicero as well as Xenophon and Cicero understood themselves. 
From 1796 to 1815 Mr. Lacy taught a school in which were trained 
numerous students who have become prominent in every sphere of 
social action. It is to such private schools that Virginia owes a 
debt which she can never repay. They have given her the men 
whose valour decided the fields of battle and whose councils guided 
her legislation ; and honored, forever honored, be the name of Drury 
Lacy among the noble teachers of the past, and of David Comfort 
among those of the present. 

This great teacher regarded his pupils with the feelings of a 
father. During my residence under his roof, I was seized by a 
typhoid fever, and was for many days insensible. My mother, and 
only surviving parent, who lived two hundred miles away, had been 
sent for to be present, as I afterwards learned, at my burial or at 
least to look upon the grave of her eldest child and only son. My 
bed had been brought from the upper room which I occupied with 
my school mates, and was spread in the parlor. It was at the 
earliest dawn of a sweet September morning in 1815 that after a 
long interval of delirium, I opened my eyes for the first time in a 
conscious state. One of the daughters of Mr. Jjslcj had stolen from 
her room on tiptoe to see whether I was still living. As I looked up, 
the face of a lovely girl, her black eyes shaded by long dark lashes, 
her glowing skin reflecting rather an Italian than a Saxon hue, and 
her raven tresses falling in ringlets about her neck, was bending over 
me. Sixty-one years of mingled joys and sorrows have rolled over 
my head since I beheld that charming vision. Often has it come 
before me in the dead of night when nature was moving to the 
music of the spheres. I have thought of it as I climbed the dizzy 
height of the mountain, or as I strolled by the shores of the sea. 



23 

Its features sometimes flash upon me from the page of Homer. 
It is before me now, and I shall never forget it. Nor, sir, will you 
ever forget it — for it was the face of your long lost, long lamented, 
and ever lovely mother.* 

In relating the events in the life of Lacy, it is curious to observe 
how unconsciously and intimately generations mingle together, and 
even centuries shake hands with each other. Lacy, who eighty years 
ago was chosen vice-president of the College, and who had been 
present at its early commemorations, died in 1815, and during that 
year I was one of his pupils. Hence the entire century of the ex- 
istence of Hampden- Sidney may be measured by two lives, one of 
which is yet unexpired — by the life of Drury Lacy, and by the life 
of him who is paying a tribute to his memory. 

WILLIAM GRAHAM. 

From the date of the resignation of John Blair Smith, the Trus- 
tees had been anxious to fill the vacancy in the chair of the presi- 
dency. But that was no easy matter. The fame of Smith had gone 
beyond our own Commonwealth, and he stood high abroad as well 
as at home. He had controlled the destinies of the institution to 
the date of his resignation — a period of thirteen troublous years — 
and had done all that could have been done by any one man during 
that calamitous interval. Moreover, he had acquired for himself 
a reputation as a debater, as a teacher, and as a divine, which was 
second to none in the ranks of the clergy of our own State or else- 
where. One man, and one man only, within the bounds of the 
Synod could fill his place, and that man was William Graham. His 
was one of those colossal names fit to lay the foundations of a temple 
upon, or to be inscribed on the flag of empire. But he was so 
intimately associated with the institution of which he was deemed 
the father, that it should seem it was impossible to obtain his ser- 
vices. At one time, a rumor reached the Board that, on account of 
his private affairs, he might be induced to accept the office, and he 
was accordingly chosen to succeed his friend and class mate Smith. 
The congregations of Briary and Cumberland also tendered him the 
pastorate of their respective churches; and commissioners were ap- 



*Note by Mr. Grigsby — "These words were addressed to the Rev. Dr. 
M. D. Hoge, who was on the platform with the speaker." 



24 

pointed to arrange the matter with the Presbytery; but at the last 
moment the force of old associations prevailed, and Graham declined 
the appointment. Finally, after a vacancy of ten years in the chair, a 
choice was made; and on the 31st day of May, 1797, the journal 
records that the Eev. Archibald Alexander appeared before the 
Board, accepted the appointment, and entered on the duties of the 
office. 

ARCHIBALD ALEXANDER. 

Those now living who have only seen Archibald Alexander in the 
shades of Princeton, an object of veneration and love to all who 
approached him, would be apt to form a very erroneous opinion of 
his person and appearance when he made his first visit to Prince 
Edward eighty-four years ago, and five years before his election to 
the presidency. He was then a beautiful boy of twenty, and though 
he looked even younger than he was, had been licensed to preach 
during the previous year ; and it seemed hard to believe that he had 
passed through the stern intellectual ordeal, which the Presby- 
terians at that early day, whether in war or peace, in the solitude 
of the forest or in the hum of the city, compelled their candidates 
to endure. His extreme youth, his exceeding personal beauty, and 
the melting tones of his voice, made an impression that has out- 
lasted two generations. His popularity soon rose to the height, and 
young and old vied with each other in demonstrations of regard. 
Even grave divines listened to his prelections with interest and 
profit. Drury Lacy was a favorite pupil of John Blair Smith, 
wrought out his sermons with uncommon skill and care, usually 
presented new and striking views of the subject in hand, and was 
fourteen years older than Alexander; yet when he had pronounced 
one of the most eloquent of those discourses which still loom among 
the shadowy landmarks of his fame, he was asked how long it had 
taken him to prepare the discourse, and he answered : "Why, I took 
it all from little Archy," meaning that he had followed out a train 
of thought suggested by one of the sermons of young Alexander. 
Crowds hung upon his lips. Some of his elder hearers, who had 
listened to the most famous preachers of their time, confessed that 
they never heard some intricate doctrines, and the nature of the 
passions, so keenly analyzed as by that young man. The entire field 
of metaphysical inquiry appeared to be familiar ground to him; 




Archibald Alexander 



25 

and a learned judge who had heard him on one occasion, expressed 
his wonder that so young a man should have shown such mastery 
over a science then little studied, and almost unknown in the State. 
But it was on the practical doctrines of Christanity he mainly dwelt, 
and some of his illustrations, after the lapse of eighty years, still 
live in human memory. It was seen, however, by close observers 
that admiration and applause did not turn his head; that in the 
height of his popularity he dwelt most earnestly on the peculiar 
tenets of the Calvinistic faith, which indeed were the tenets of the 
Eeformation, but which served rather to make his hearers uneasy 
than to be pleased with themselves ; and that, young as he was, and 
devoted to his studies, he was never more congenially employed than 
in binding up the broken spirit, and in ministering at the death bed 
of the humblest human being. 

Archibald Alexander was born in Rockbridge county, Virginia, 
on the 17th day of April, 1772, of Scotch-Irish ancestors, who had 
passed through Pennsylvania to the Colony of Virginia, and who 
had been active in forming the first Presbyterian churches of the 
Valley, and in rearing Liberty Hall Academy, the germ of the pres- 
ent Washington and Lee University. He had been educated by 
William Graham in letters and theology, and possessed, in common 
with all the pupils of that wonderful man, that faculty which Moore 
the poet pronounced the greatest of all the faculties — the faculty of 
thinking on one's feet; and in his old age Alexander gave it as his 
deliberate opinion that if he were required to put forth all his 
powers on any occasion, he would prefer, after a thorough medita- 
tion upon his theme, to trust to his extemporaneous words. He was 
five and twenty when he entered on the duties of the Presidency, 
and in the ministrations of his office laid the foundations of his 
subsequent fame. Fortunately for Mr. Alexander, he was asso- 
ciated, during a part of his term of service, with two young Vir- 
ginians, whose reputation is connected with his own by kindred 
genius, by similar tastes, and by a common faith. The younger of 
these, who in the fulness of time was to devote his talents to the 
rearing of that theological institution whose buildings now adorn 
this village (which has for so many years sent forth its annual 
quota of pious students to fill the pulpits of the South and West, 
and to bear to distant peoples the blessings of the gospel), was then 
twenty years old, was the junior of Mr. Alexander by five years, and 



26 

was advancing with giant strides in the regions of learning. The 
other young man was a year older than John Holt Bice, was equally 
studious, and was to win an honorable reputation in the pulpit and 
in polite literature. But neither Rice nor Conrad Speece had 
those physical qualities of the orator which Alexander possessed in 
so eminent a degree; but all three were engaged in those metaphy- 
sical studies which quicken the faculties, and are invaluable in 
developing extemporaneous powers of debate. All three were fond 
of the pen, and if we should judge from their pseudonyms and quo- 
tations, their favorite bard was Young. Through their entire lives, 
their most powerful sermons, which raised the respect of learned 
audiences, as well as those which moved to and fro the wave of the 
multitude, were unwritten. These young men were bent on the 
full performance of their college duties ; but then as theretofore, the 
income of the College rarely supplied a competent support to the 
teachers. Every effort was made by the Trustees to obtain money, 
but without pronounced success. Rice and Speece soon resigned; 
Alexander also sent in his resignation, but was prevailed upon to 
withdraw it. He remained until November, 1806, when he finally 
resigned the chair, and was succeeded by the Rev. William S. Reid, 
who was invited to take charge of the College ad interim. Here Mr. 
Alexander, at the age of thirty-four, passes from our canvas, and 
it is only within our province to say that as a pastor in Philadelphia 
and as the head of the Princeton Theological Seminary, the child 
of his thought and substantially the work of his hand, he rendered 
those services which gave him that high position in the theological 
literature of the age. In one respect he was more fortunate than 
his associates, Rice and Speece. They may be said to have died 
prematurely and left no offspring. Alexander survived Rice 
twenty years, and Speece fifteen; and on the 22d of October, 1851, 
at the age of seventy-nine, in the shadow of the venerable institu- 
tion of which he was the main architect, and in the presence of 
descendants, who, even before his departure, had invested his name 
with new lustre, and made it the synonym of wide scholarship, of 
refined eloquence, and of unblemished worth, this good man was 
gathered to his fathers. 



27 



JOHN HOLT RICE AND CONRAD SPEECE. 

I have alluded to John Holt Rice and Conrad Speece as the as- 
sociates of Mr. Alexander in the faculty of the College, in the 
Church, and in general estimation, and their names call up so many 
pleasing images in our own times, that I must advert to them for 
a moment. I can almost feel the breath of their living presence 
in this house. The face of Eice is seen on the canvas of Hubard, 
and is a faithful likeness of the original. At the first glance there 
is a sternness and a harshness which would lead the speculator to 
infer that the subject had taken his view of men and things after 
the type of Knox rather than of Calvin, that he was no friend to 
the muses, that he had never read an ode of Sappho or Anacreon, 
and that he would have driven the playful Horace from his study 
with a horsewhip ; but on a closer inspection we mark an expression 
of concealed humor awaiting an explosion. The sombre, sad, un- 
certain eye, the straight nose ending abruptly (like Soracte pausing 
on the curl), and the pyramidal forehead uncovered with hair, and 
the broad, determined chin, represent him as he was. His height 
exceeded six feet, and his long limbs hung loosely about him. Even 
his voice lacked that rotundity and mellowness which render com- 
mon thoughts grateful to the public ear ; and his action, at times in 
a high degree impressive, lacked every attribute of grace. But 
within that ungracious casket was enshrined one of the greatest 
minds of the age in which he lived. His early opportunities had 
been few, but he grappled with the most formidable difficulties, and 
grew stronger from the wrestle. As a controvertist he has left us 
specimens of his skill which well deserve the study of modern theo- 
logians. In his strictly controversial tracts, his tract on baptism, 
his tracts on apostolical succession and the early priesthood, and 
others which I need not number, in which he has discussed his 
theme with an affluence of learning that bent all history to his pur- 
pose, with a skill in classical criticism that made every Latin and 
Greek and Hebrew authority speak on his side of the question, and 
with a temper that neither wanton insult nor false logic could 
chafe or cloud — if these tracts were collected and bound in a single 
volume, such a book would indeed be a monument of the genius of 
Eice, but it would more especially become an invaluable treas- 
ure to the general scholar as well as to the professor of theology. 



28 

While he was one of the most able dialecticians in the chair of 
divinity, he was also one of the most effective preachers of the Vir- 
ginia pulpit. Sixty-two years ago in Norfolk, when he was at the 
age of five and thirty, I saw him for the first time, and I remember 
the crowds that filled the church and the private dwellings in which 
he preached. Like his preceptor, Graham, he possessed the talents 
of a statesman as well as those of a theologian. The negotiations 
which led to the establishment of Union Theological Seminary show 
this very plainly. With all his sterner worth, he had a loving heart, 
a most genial temper that escaped unruffled under great provocation, 
a ready wit, a large share of humor, and a passionate love of letters, 
beyond as well as within the immediate sphere of his profession. 
His intellectual powers kept pace with his years, and his last sermon 
was one of the grandest efforts of his career. He fell in the prime 
of his intellectual strength forty-five years ago, and breathed his 
last in his house at the Seminary whose creation was the work of 
his hand, and was buried at "Willington,"* a few yards from the 
dwelling in which he led his bride to the altar, and in which nearly 
all the men who were connected with the College during the first 
half century of its existence were frequent and welcome guests. 

Of Conrad Speece I had not the same opportunities of personal 
observation. He was born in the town of New London, in Bedford 
county, Virginia, on the 7th of November, 1776, and was of German 
and Gallic descent, an admirable commixture of blood for a modern 
theologian. Like Lacy, and Eice, and Hoge, and Cushing, and a 
host of men who have attained eminence, he began his studies late, 
repaired to Liberty Hall at the age of nineteen, and finished his 
general and theological studies during the presidency of William 
Graham, acquiring under his supervision that critical skill in Latin, 
that taste for metaphj^sical disquisition, that keen relish for general 
literature, and that habit of extemporaneous speech which were 
seen in the pupils of Liberty Hall. From his tutorial charge at 
Hampden- Sidney, Speece passed to the ministry, and in 1813 was 
settled in the church of Augusta, where he spent his entire life 
thereafter. He, too, lacked those physical advantages which pre- 
pare the way for more important qualities ; nor did he seek to repair 
his deficiencies by those conventional arrangements of deportment 



*Dr. Rice's remains now rest at Hampden-Sidney. 



29 

and dress which so often conceal the imperfections of nature. He 
was a very large man, and abounded in blood and bone, and was 
seen to suffer much in spells of hot weather ; his loose clothing made 
him appear larger still, looking as if it had been cut out of the main- 
sail of a man-of-war. Leading a life of the utmost seclusion, he 
was a utilitarian in all things, and in the cutting of his coat would 
not permit the tailor to make a seam in the middle of the back — a 
crotchet like that of Chancellor Wythe, who would not use capital 
letters at the beginning of a sentence or of a proper name, lest he 
should impinge upon the democracy of the alphabet. The officers 
of the College had generally been married men, and their dwellings 
were, as at the present day, the resort of a highly intellectual and 
polished society; but Speece remained a bachelor to the last, and 
was never in love except on paper with a pen in his hand or behind 
his ear. 

The extraordinary characteristics of Speece were his ready speech, 
and the extraordinary ability with which he would discuss the most 
difficult themes in theology, and make the people understand him 
or think they understood him. I had long heard of his achieve- 
ments in the field of reason, and I confess with some degree of in- 
credulity ; but when I heard him in Eichmond some forty-odd years 
ago preach a sermon before the Synod of Virginia, I felt that there 
had been no overestimate of his worth. And when he preached one 
or two sermons in Norfolk in 1804, during the residence of William 
Wirt in that city, that distinguished orator and patriot spoke of his 
exhibitions in terms of the highest admiration, as I know from 
those who heard them. Speece was also remarkable for intellectual 
independence, in his manner of settling the problems of morals or 
of theology. He was a minister of the Presbyterian Church, and 
loved her ordinances; but having some scruples on the subject of 
infant baptism he withdrew from her communion, but when he had 
become a little more familiar with his Greek, he came back again. 

He possessed a fertile imagination, wandered often and at times 
quite happily in the flowery regions of literature, and sent forth a 
number of essays* which were favorably received by those for whom 



*The Mountaineer. Harrisonburg, Va., 1818. (Ananias Davisson.) 
From 1805 through 1807 Dr. Speece issued the Virginia Religious Maga- 
zine, published at Lexington, three volumes. This contains much good 
material, verse and prose, a great part of it by the Editor. 



30 

they were designed. He had a deep vein of humor which was never 
impeded by the cankering cares of daily life, and which sometimes 
moved the mirth of an entire Synod. He loved his flock and was 
dearly beloved by them, dying in their midst the 17th of February, 
1836, after a pastorate of nearly a quarter of a century. His was 
a great reputation, lost for the want of a little management; and 
some spice of anger, I had almost said, mingles with our regret for 
his failure. He might have married in early life a woman of sense 
and spirit, who would have lopped the growth of a wayward tem- 
perament, and insensibly have prepared him for that wide theatre 
of usefulness and distinction which was always within his reach, and 
which he was so well qualified to adorn.* 

WILLIAM SHIELDS EEID. 

To provide for the state of things consequent upon the resigna- 
tion of Mr. Alexander, the Trustees on the 15th day of January, 
1807, "appointed," I quote the words of the resolution, "Mr. Wil- 
liam S. Eeid to superintend the business of the College as at present 
until October"; and it was further voted that "he should have the 
privilege of occupying the president's house and the lands per- 
taining thereto." 

On the 6th of June following, the Board elected unanimously the 
Eev. Moses Hoge to the presidency of the College. Although Mr. 
Eeid was the superintendent of the College for a few months only, 
without, however, the title of President or Vice-President, his faith- 
ful service as a Tutor for five or six years deserves a respectful 
recognition. He was born in Chester county, Pennsylvania, of 
Scotch-Irish parents, on the 21st of April, 1778, graduated in the 
College of New Jersey in 1802, studied theology under Batch and 
Hoge, and was licensed to preach in the spring of 1806. He was 
in his 29th year at the date of the resignation of Mr. Alexander, 
and had gained the esteem of all who had been thrown into personal 
or official relations with him. Though he withdrew from the Col- 
lege a few months after the appointment of Dr. Hoge, he did not 
withdraw from the office of teaching, but choosing Lynchburg as 



*The unusual lot fell to Dr. Speece of being chosen five times Mod- 
erator of the Synod of Virginia— in 1810, 1813, 1817, 1825, and 1835. 
See Van Devanter, History of Augusta Church- Staunton. 1900. 



31 

his residence, while he preached to a yet unorganized church, he 
opened a classical school, which ultimately consisted of girls only, 
and which was attended by a long array of pupils, who have been for 
two generations the pride and grace and ornament of the spheres 
in which they moved. The work of such an institution cannot be 
estimated at its full value. For more than forty years, at a time 
when female education was at a low ebb, he annually sent forth a 
large number of pupils, who had received a thorough classical and 
Christian training, and who exerted an influence on the mind and 
morals of the community that was felt in the past age, that is felt 
now, and that will be felt for years to come. He was one of those 
pure and genial men who never had an enemy. His gentle kind- 
ness, his dignified and cordial address, his devoted piety, won the 
general regard. Nor was the unbounded love which was cherished 
for him the result of a time-serving policy, or the growth of that 
wide circle of intellectual and wealthy relationship with which he 
became connected by marriage, nor of that religious denomination 
of which he became a member ; but sprang from the heart of a whole 
community, and especially from the love and admiration of his 
pupils, and the descendants of those pupils who were scattered far 
and wide through Virginia and the adjoining States. His literary 
and moral worth was recognized at home and abroad ; and his Alma 
Mater honored herself by bestowing upon him her highest theologi- 
cal honor. He was the model of a Christian gentleman. He died 
June 23, 1853. Virginia will ever value his good offices to her 
children, and the lovers of Hampden- Sidney may entertain a just 
pride that such a man has a place upon her rolls. 

MOSES HOGE. 

We have already said that on the 7th of June, 1807, the Eev. 
Moses Hoge was chosen to succeed -Mr. Alexander in the chair of 
the Presidency, and having been chosen an assistant pastor in the 
churches of Briary and Cumberland, entered at once on the two 
responsible offices of president and pastor. In years, in person, in 
manners, which so often usurp a reputation for talents among ob- 
servers, and in genius, no two men of that generation were wider 
apart from each other than Archibald Alexander and Moses Hoge. 
They were indeed both descended from a Scotch ancestry, but that 



32 

was the only point of connection between them. Alexander, who 
had been trained from childhood in polite letters, and had mingled 
freely with the world, was of a pleasing address, was a mere boy 
when he entered on the presidency, had during a term of nine years 
developed into vigorous manhood, had in that interval mastered the 
moral and philosophical literature of the day, had cultivated with 
uncommon care the graces of oratory, and once every Sunday had 
set before his audience a feast which was equally welcome to the 
scholar and to the humble Christian. At thirty-four he still re- 
tained much of his early beauty, and at all times appeared younger 
than he was ; his voice was full and resonant, and had not lost those 
bewitching tones which before he was twenty had drawn tears from 
old and young. Hoge was in almost every respect the reverse of 
such a portrait. He had reached the advanced age of fifty-five, 
and was by many years the oldest man who had filled the chair of the 
presidency. He had no early training, had studied mathematics 
before he attempted the languages, and was twenty-six years old 
when he entered Liberty Hall. It rarely happens that a person who 
undertakes the study of Latin and Greek late in life derives those 
advantages from them which make the mastery of the English 
tongue a plaything and a pleasure. The experience of Hoge was no 
exception to the rule. Nor was he endowed with those physical 
qualities which are almost indispensable to a speaker in a mixed 
audience. He was about the common height, was remarkably plain 
in his person, and was so peculiar in his gestures both in the pulpit 
and out of it, that William Graham, after repeated efforts to reform 
his manners, gave up the task in despair. No man since the days 
of Samuel Johnson, and especially no popular speaker, ever retained 
so faithfully those early incongruities which are usually lost in an 
intimate association with polished society. Yet this man, who was 
born in Frederick county, Virginia, of Scottish parents, on the 15th 
day of February, 1752, who had completed his college course in 
1780, and had been licensed to preach in 1781, who had, like 
Graham and John Blair Smith, borne his part in arms during the 
Eevolution, and who through life was destitute of that tact which 
is necessary for the success of the highest talents, was one of the 
great lights of his generation. He had great powers of analysis, and 
a capacity of adapting his logic to the general mind rarely surpassed. 
When the flood of French infidelity was sweeping over the land, and 



1*1 



flWffif 




CrfaXfX <KfWL 



33 

Godwin's Enquirer and his Political Justice and the works of 
Thomas Paine had a place on the book shelves of many of the most 
prominent men of the age; and when a popular French savant had 
predicted the year and the day when Christianity would expire, and 
pious men shrunk from the storm that was raging around them, 
Hoge rushed to the rescue, and in his thorough confutation of the 
blasphemies of Paine* (which were heard in the pulpit and were 
published far and wide) received the benediction of all moral and 
serious men. His caste of character was suited to such a crisis and 
he met it bravely. As a pastor he was beloved by his flock, who 
looked up to him, particularly in his declining years, with reverence 
and awe ; for he brought to the pulpit a reputation approaching to 
sanctity, a capacity of illustrating the more abstruse topics, the 
investigation of which was demanded by the public opinion of the 
day, with a force of reasoning, which, while it afforded conviction 
to educated men, was understood by the weakest of his hearers. 
For, in common with all the pupils of Graham, he had the faculty 
of ready argument, and the habit of extemporaneous speech. jSTor 
did he confine himself to strict argumentative discussion, for which 
he was so well qualified and which was indispensable in the earlier 
years of his ministry; but late in life, and on occasions of the holy 
communion, he indulged in a strain of eloquence, which, set off 
by his peculiar voice and irregular but impressive action, appealed 
irresistibly to every heart. Such was his popularity in the Valley, 
as well as in the country south of James, that he was spoken of as 
the successor of Graham, and the Trustees of Hampden- Sidney 
thought themselves fortunate in securing his services. 

It was in 1815, the eighth year of his presidency, that I saw him 
for the first time, in the recitation room and in the pulpit. He was 
then sixty-three, and appeared to my young eyes to be in extreme 
old age. He had lost his teeth, and his utterances were so imper- 
fect that I could not understand "him; but he was understood by 
his people, who every Sunday filled the old Hall and heard him with 
rapt attention. In 1812 he was appointed professor of Theology 



♦This appeared (pp. 248-332) as an appendix to Dr. Hoge's reprint of 
certain pamphlets under the general title Christian Panoply. Shep- 
herd's-Town: P. Rootes and C. Blagrove. 1797. Dr. Hoge's contribution 
was The Sophist Unmasked, in a series of letters addressed to Thomas 
Paine, author of a book entitled The Age of Reason. By Philobiblius. 



34 

by the Synod of Virginia, and discharged the duties of that office, 
in addition to those of the presidency and the pastorate of his 
churches until 1820. In that year this venerable man, while at- 
tending the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, died in 
Philadelphia at the age of sixty-eight, and was committed to that 
earth which already held the ashes of John Blair Smith and Drury 
Lacy, his predecessors in the chair of the College. 

Partly from the peculiarities of his deportment, partly from the 
caste of his mind, and from his engrossing devotion to the laborious 
duties of his various offices, and, I may add, from a species of elo- 
quence that appealed with equal force to the reason and the imagi- 
nation, and which drew from John Eandolph the expression, "that 
Dr. Hoge was the best of orators," he held a place in the public 
regard which few men of a generation succeed in reaching, and 
which may well fill the measure of a generous ambition. His hos- 
pitality was dispensed with equal freedom to the rich and the poor, 
to the eloquent statesman and to the wanderer by the wayside. 
Even the Indian from the waters of the Tombigby and the Alabama 
— regions then almost untrodden by the foot of the Saxon — on his 
route to Washington, knocked at his door, and received a hearty 
welcome. Like his predecessor, Alexander, he was blessed in his 
children. He saw three of his sons become ministers in the church 
of his affections; and it is gracious to the memory of such a man 
to add that neither they nor their descendants have allowed the 
good and unsullied name of their ancestor to be forgotten or to 
grow dim with years. 

PRESIDENT GUSHING. 

With Dr. Hoge ended the series of presidents who had taken a part 
in the Revolution, or who had been born before the Declaration of 
Independence. The death of this good man was in some degree 
unexpected by the guardians of the College. He had indeed 
reached his sixty-eighth year, and was in delicate health, but the 
vigorous labors of his early life, his regular habits of temperance 
and exercise, and his congenial pursuits, seemed to promise a pro- 
tracted existence. His death made a blank that it appeared im- 
possible to fill. He had not only been a most efficient teacher, and 
had by the laborious services of thirteen years reared a reputation 




Jonathan P. Cushing 



35 

that had extended far and wide, but was regarded in his clerical 
capacity with a reverence and affection rarely surpassed. One man, 
and only one, could fill his place ; and the distinguished theologian 
who had been the third president of the college, and who was then a 
professor in a great theological institution which had risen under 
his eye, was elected to succeed Dr. Hoge. The neighboring churches, 
which had ever been the two supporting columns of the College, also 
united in the call ; but as might have been seen under all the circum- 
stances of the case, Archibald Alexander declined the appointment. 
About three years before the death of Hoge, a young man of four 
and twenty years had been chosen a tutor, and soon after the libra- 
rian of the College. His fine person, his dignified deportment, the 
skill and zeal with which he discharged the duties devolving upon 
him, and the interest and tact which he exhibited in promoting the 
welfare of the institution, conciliated the public regard; and in 
1819 he was chosen the professor of Natural Philosophy and Chem- 
istry. It was now resolved to place him in the chair of the presi- 
dency, and on the 21st of September, 1821, Jonathan Peter Cushing 
was chosen to that office. He was born at Eochester, New Hamp- 
shire, on the 12th of March, 1793, and was apprenticed to a mechan- 
ical trade, and by his industry accumulating money enough to pur- 
chase his time, he entered Phillip's Acadenry, paid his way by work- 
ing at his trade and by teaching, entered Dartmouth College, and 
was graduated in that college in 1817; thus entering as a conqueror 
on the stage of life. In his generous efforts to obtain an education 
this noble young man had impaired his health, and to relieve the 
symptoms of a threatened consumption, he sought the genial atmos- 
phere of a southern clime. Like most young men who undertake 
the acquisition of a learned education at a late age, he devoted more 
of his time to the mathematical and scientific departments of 
knowledge than to the classical, and it is on his excellence in the 
sphere of his choice that his reputation now rests. He also strictly 
kept abreast of the contested literary topics of his age; and I well 
remember the interest with which he read, forty-eight years ago, on 
the floor of the library of Virginia, the letters of Eobertson to 
Gibbon, which were said to compromise the religious character of 
the great leader of the Scotch Presbyterian Kirk — the volume had 
then recently been published in the correspondence of Gibbon, and 
I placed it before Mr. Cushing. I was most impressed by the re- 



36 

fined dignity of his address, by his various and accurate knowledge, 
and by the sterling sense of his talk. He also delivered an address 
before the Historical Society of Virginia, which was an earnest of 
his desire to promote the literature of his adopted country in other 
spheres than those to which his own studies were directed. During 
his administration a fresh impulse was given to the College. 

The handsome buildings which now adorn your grounds rose in 
all their fair proportions, and the number of students went far 
beyond the average of any preceding decennial period. Assiduous 
efforts were made by the Trustees as a body and as individuals, and 
especially by the President himself, to enlarge the funds of the 
College, and these efforts were attended with unexpected success. 

In May, 1831, when he had filled the office of president for ten 
years, he sent in his resignation, which he withdrew at the request 
of the Board, but afterwards renewed it to take effect on the first 
of October, 1832. But he was again re-elected, and held the office 
until his death in the city of Ealeigh on the 13th day of April, 1835, 
at the age of forty-two. Thus died this eminent man in the prime 
of life, when his faculties had scarcely attained to their full devel- 
opment. As the head of a College, he had those indispensable 
qualities, without which the highest literary attainments avail but 
little. His genius was essentially executive, and embraced not only 
the general outline of discipline, but its practical details; and he 
possessed a dignity of address and a steadiness of purpose invaluable 
to the government of a literary institution. Mr. Cushing was the 
only president of the College at the date of his appointment who 
was not a minister of the Presbvterian Church, nor was he a mem- 
ber of that denomination, but died in the communion of the Epis- 
copal Church. It only remains to say that the Board of Trustees, 
sensible of his great worth, commemorated his death by a public 
oration. 

WILLIAM. MAXWELL. 

The successor of Carroll* was one of the most eminent men in 
the State. He had gained a high reputation at the bar, where he 
had been engaged in cases in which the ablest men, who were also 



*In the manuscript as it has been preserved there is no mention of 
President Carroll, 1835-1838, beyond this statement of fact. Those pages 
must have been lost. 




William Maxwell 



37 

his seniors in the profession and in years, were opposed to him, and 
in the fiercest conflicts had never sustained a disastrous defeat. 
Whatever ma}' have been the fate of their case, his clients were never 
disposed to complain. He was the second layman who had been 
elected president, but even with the most abstract topics of the 
Calvinistic system he was so intimately acquainted that no man 
who had once measured weapons with him would willingly en- 
counter him a second time. From early manhood his attention had 
been turned to religious subjects; and having joined the Presby- 
terian Church in early life he remained one of its most zealous and 
consistent members to his dying day. 

Maxwell was the son of a gallant Scotchman who during the war 
of the Eevolution had held important position in the navy of Vir- 
ginia, and had rendered some effectual service on the waters of the 
Chesapeake, and of the James, and of the Elizabeth when Virginia 
had first raised flag on the sea. 

William Maxwell was born in Norfolk on the 27th of Februarv, 
1774, graduated at Yale College in 1802, where he was a favorite 
pupil of Dwight, studied law, and in 1809 made an argument in 
the case of Wilson and Cunningham vs. the Marine Insurance Com- 
pany of Norfolk, which placed him in the front rank of his pro- 
fession. From 1809 to 1826, when he withdrew for a short time 
from the bar, not a year passed in which he did not make a speech 
that was the talk of the time. In the criminal case of Garcia and 
Castillano his speech drew from a gentleman who died recently, the 
Father of the Norfolk Bar, the remark that he had heard some of 
the best speakers of the first lawyers of Virginia during the present 
century, and that Maxwell in the case in question had surpassed 
them all. From the bar he passed to the House of Delegates and 
to the Senate of Virginia. On one occasion Andrew Stevenson, 
who had just returned from the mission to England, heard him 
make a speech of half an hour in the House of Delegates, and when 
he ended, that gentleman congratulated him, saying that he had 
hit most happily the best manner of speech in the House of Com- 
mons. His speeches were wholly extemporaneous, for he never 
wrote a sentence of a speech before delivery in all his life. He 
possessed, far above his compeers, not only an extraordinary skill 
in the metaphysical part of speaking, but a pure and sweet imagi- 
nation, and a perfect familiarity with our best literature, especially 



38 

the prose of Milton as well as his poetry, the wealth of Bacon, and 
the harmony of Sir Philip Sidney, whose Arcadia is now in my pos- 
session, and bears the mark of Maxwell's pencil. Nor was the effect 
of his eloquence felt only within the limits of this Commonwealth. 
He was the only eminent man that I ever knew who would ever 
venture, or who ever ventured, to appear before such a body as the 
Phi Beta Kappa Society of Yale on one of its formal anniversaries, 
without a single line of written preparation. Yet Maxwell made 
the attempt and succeeded. When the committee of the Society 
reported its thanks to the speaker and requested a copy of the speech 
for publication, they could hardly believe their ears when told that 
the speech was entirely extemporaneous. On that occasion he re- 
ceived the congratulations of the venerable Dr. Sprague, then in the 
zenith of his fame, (who, I regret to say, has just passed from us 
forever) — that gentleman, himself an orator, declared to him that 
although he would not say his speech was the ablest he ever heard, 
for the subject did not admit of the highest order of intellectual 
effort, that it was the most graceful and the most eloquent speech to 
which he had ever listened. 

From my fifth year, when in his pew adjoining the one in which 
I sate, I watched for those peculiar intonations of a psalm that will 
recur to all who have ever heard him sing, to the day of his death, 
his course has run substantially under my observation. As in most 
lives, there were in his, years of sunshine undimmed even by a 
passing cloud — fame at the bar and that prestige which follows in 
the wake of legal fame; wealth that overflowed his shallow deposi- 
tories and dispensed life and health and joy to the suffering poor 
within his reach, or reared the church or the College, or returned 
the African to his native clime, or sent the gospel to the isles of the 
sea. During this period he raised in his native city at his own 
expense a beautiful temple devoted to the general offices of piety 
and letters. From one of those sudden revolutions which attend 
property in towns, his patrimonial estate turned to dross in his 
possession; and the pressure of years made a retirement from the 
bar, the members of which belonged to another generation, a be- 
coming if not a profitable act. But the keen exercise of his facul- 
ties was necessary to his happiness, and this was to be found in the 
course of studies pursued by the higher classes of the College at 
Hampden-Sidney. He entered on his duties there (in 1838) with 



39 

great zest. The very presence of such a man was to the candidate 
of intellectual distinction a lesson, and a vision to be seen with de- 
light. In 1844 he resigned his office and removed to Richmond 
(where he edited the Virginia Historical Register, which is now 
deemed a treasure, and sells for twenty times its original cost) , and 
there resided until his death in 1857. 

The leading qualities of this excellent man were his piety and 
his eloquence. His wit was as keen as the scimitar of Saladin, and 
his humor, which he put forth at will, was irresistible. As an orator 
he stood in his day and generation without an equal. I have heard 
many of the most eloquent men who, from the date of the Virginia 
Convention of 1776 to the middle of the present century, were 
classed among our greatest speakers, and looking to the sphere which 
he chose, I do not hesitate to declare that in my opinion Maxwell 
surpassed them all. It is true that we cannot point to any speech 
of his which equals the demonstrative grandeur of Marshall in the 
case of Jonathan Bobbins, of Tazewell, in defence of Branch's reso- 
lutions, or of Wickham on the doctrine of treason, in Burr's trial; 
but it must be remembered that a great legal argument need not be, 
and very rarely has been, accompanied by glowing eloquence or by 
graceful action. Maxwell's readiness was uncommon; if knocked 
up at midnight and requested to speak, he would make a finer speech 
than any one else could have done after deliberate preparation. Nor 
was this the readiness of a common talker ; it was the result of the 
severe training of the closet, which rendered all his powers available 
on the instant. If mere argument was needed, he brought to the 
work an intellect among the sharpest of his time, and skilled in the 
law of fence; where broad and comprehensive reasoning was re- 
quired, or the more ingenious subtlety of disquisition, he was equally 
at home. But his peculiar merit, in which he was not approached 
by the ablest of his colleagues at the bar and in the Senate, was the 
beauty and variety of his rhetoric. Such a style of speech owed its 
perfection to two sources — a genius of a high order, susceptible of 
the most thorough culture, and the cultivation of all its faculties. 

Maxwell published a small volume of poems* which in the esti- 



*Poems. By William Maxwell, Esq. Philadelphia. 1812 (two edi- 
tions). One of these poems is an Elegy to the memory of the Rev. Ben- 
jamin Grigsby. Conrad Speece reviewed the book in John Holt Rice's 



40 

mation of certain readers rather lessened than increased his general 
reputation. There were in the volume a few odes after the fashion 
of Anacreon which struck the common reader as inconsistent with 
the author's fame as a speaker and the dignity of his character, but 
which, though undervalued by harsh and ignorant men among his 
own people, received the warm praise of the historian William Kos- 
coe, himself equally at home in prose and poetry. Maxwell's odes 
on the naval victories of the war of 1812 formed perhaps his most 
brilliant poetical work. 

CONCLUSION. 

We now close the account of the men who presided in your insti- 
tution during the century that is past ; and it may be said that they 
would have conferred honor on the first colleges of the country. 
They did a great work in their day and generation ; but they passed 
through many trials. It is painful to reflect that the resignations 
of every one of these able men were brought about by the low state 
of the finances of the College. Men who, if they had engaged in 
secular pursuits, would have achieved the highest rewards of wealth 
and distinction, could not afford to trust to the uncertain develop- 
ments of a distant future for the payment of present debt, and they 
were reluctantly compelled to seek elsewhere for that maintenance 
for themselves and their families which was denied them here. Let 
us take warning from the past. Let us remember those words 
which were uttered by divine lips, and which have been recently 
illustrated by a son of Hampden- Sidney beneath a Southern sky, 
that "other men labored, and that we have entered into their labors/' 
and that it is our duty not only to hallow the memory of our bene- 
factors, but to aid in carrying successfully forward those schemes 
which they inaugurated so early and upheld so faithfully for the 
welfare of their fellow men. Let us learn from the sad experience 
of our fathers the great lesson that in a sparsely settled, tobacco 
planting region, the income of which is as variable as the seasons, 
no literary institution can rely for support on the receipts derived 



Evangelical and Literary Magazine, I, 452-459 (1818). He ended his 
review, "With this book in my hand I will no more suffer the assertion 
to pass in silence that Virginia has not yet produced a poet worthy of 
the title." 



41 

from the tuition of the ever-varying number of pupils; and that 
unless it be sustained by a permanent fund to relieve the present 
and pressing emergency, we must lose, as we have heretofore lost, the 
services of the ablest teachers, and the ability to obtain others ; and 
that the institution which has been reared by our ancestors will be 
a mere meteor casting now and then a sudden flash through the 
darkness that surrounds it, instead of becoming a permanent orb 
which shall diffuse in its constant and steady revolutions the heal- 
ing light of science and literature throughout the land. 

Let me remind you of the solemn truth that when the ceremonies 
of this centennial commencement shall have ended, we shall never 
behold another ; that before the recurrence of a similar occasion, the 
young and the old, the good and the beautiful and the brave and the 
wise — every human being now within this hall, as well as all who 
are beyond it, will have been sleeping for years and perhaps for 
generations in the sepulchres that now hold the ashes of their sires ; 
and that it now rests with them, whether they shall perish as the 
leaves stripped from the tree by the passing wind, or be remembered 
with gratitude and praise by those who shall succeed them. The 
immortality of honor can only be purchased with a price. The 
sluggard slays no giant, and wins no rule ; and whoever fails to sow 
in due season reaps no harvest from the most fertile soil. Yet how 
precious the thought and desire that, though our very names and 
race shall have passed from the patrimonial land of our love, we 
shall be remembered as the benefactors of our fellow men ; to know 
that when another centennial sun shall shine upon this scene, our 
own humble services will be held in memory; and that our own 
names will be honored with praise. If such an emotion stir your 
bosom, rally to the support of your noble institution. Write your 
names ere it is too late in that book which will be opened on that 
next centennial morning in the halls of Hampden- Sidney. ! 
spare the blush of your descendant who shall on that day seek in its 
votive pages the ancestral name, and seek in vain. 

And as we began our review of the past century with a grateful 
recognition of the benignant care of an overruling Providence in 
the years that are gone, so let us end by invoking the Giver of every 
good and perfect gift to bless ourselves and our descendants, and 
to uphold and cherish us and the noble institution of our fathers in 
the years that are to come. 



NOTES.* 



THE CHARTER. 

Of the Charter, which for the last ninety-two years has been pub- 
lished farand wide, there is one sentiment which in this centennial 
year of the College deserves a pointed recognition. It must be 
remembered that the war of the Kevohition was not ended at the 
date of the Charter, and that some predatory excursions were still 
made on the shores of the upper Chesapeake by marauding parties 
of the British, and even that moment it could not be affirmed with 
certainty what the future might be. Even at that moment if Great 
Britain could have dissolved the alliance between France and the 
United States, she would have renewed the war with her Colonies, 
and she might have subdued them. As it was the want of a power- 
ful fleet in our waters which produced the result of our recent Civil 
War, so it was the presence of the navy of France that enabled our 
fathers to succeed in the war of the Revolution. At such an epoch 
the Presbytery and the Board of Trustees determined that no doubt 
should exist about their opinions, and at the close of the third sec- 
tion of the Charter they enact : 

That in order to preserve in the minds of the students that 
sacred love and attachment which they should ever bear to the 
principles of the present glorious Revolution, the greatest care 
and caution shall be used in electing such professors and mas- 
ters, to the end that no person shall be so elected unless the 
uniform tenor of his conduct manifest to the world his sincere 
affection for the liberty and independence of the United States 
of America. 



*It should be said that Mr. Grigsby had not revised this Address for 
publication. The very interesting material of these Notes is taken from 
certain parts of the MS. which would have been reworked. Throughout 
the text Mr. Grigsby's notes are indicated. — A. J. Morrison, Ed. 



44 



FIRST VISIT TO HAMPDEN-SIDNEY. 

It was in 1815, during the thirty-ninth year of the College, and 
in the eighth of the presidency of Dr. Hoge that I visited Hampden- 
Sidney for the first time. As but few living, I am grieved to say, 
can now speak from personal observation of the College with its 
environs such as it was sixty-one years ago, I will endeavor to recall 
its appearance at that time. The site of the building in which we 
are now assembled, and of the present College proper, was in a 
forest that stretched from Morton's old store to the old Hall, a one- 
story wooden building probably forty by twenty-five feet, with seats 
raised one above another, which was situated between the present 
College building and the fence on the main road passing through 
the present village. In this building were held the exhibitions of 
the College, and it was also used as the Church of the Presbyterian 
congregation of the neighborhood. As you entered the eastern door, 
and I believe there was no other, you saw on the left hand a platform 
three feet high, extending across the building, on which was a 
pulpit, from which Dr. Hoge preached every Sunday, and a chair 
for the precentor, who was in my day, and had been long before, the 
venerable James Morton, who had served his country faithfully 
during the Revolution (especially in the battles near Philadelphia), 
had been for a short time the steward of the College, and was for 
half a century one of the most valuable members of the Board of 
Trustees. Hymn books were then rare, and were never brought 
into church, and it was the office of the precentor not only to raise 
the tune, but to give out the hymns in couplets to the people. When 
Dr. Hoge had ended one of those famous sermons which John Ran- 
dolph used to ride up, booted and spurred, from Bizarre to hear, 
the voices of old and young would send forth a sound that shook 
the roof and was heard through the adjoining forest. 

Another building of the Hampden- Sidney of that day was the 
house of the president, a one-story wooden building with a room on 
either side of the central passage, and a finished loft; and there may 
have been a shed room or two. The site of the house may yet be 
traced, and about one hundred yards westward from the house of 
the president, on ground now enclosed in the lot of Professor Hol- 
laday, was the main College building of brick, forty-one by thirty- 
odd feet perhaps, and two stories high. It was deemed the wonder 



45 

of the day. Travellers would turn aside to see it, and it was un- 
doubtedly the largest brick structure reared by Protestant hands 
(circa 1783) in the cause of education between the falls of James 
Eiver and the Pacific ocean. There was also a steward's house of 
moderate dimensions. Such was the Hampden- Sidney of sixty- 
one years ago. 

STATE OF THE TOBACCO COUNTRY. 

It was not until the close of the war of 1812 that the first burst 
of sunshine (from 1783 to 1814) fell upon this part of the country. 
Before that time when the traveller visited the gatherings at 
churches and on court days, and entered the dwellings of the people, 
he saw none of those signs of prosperity which ten years later were 
everywhere visible. The houses were mainly of wood, and rarely 
had more than two rooms on a floor. The furniture was always 
made at home, was plain and not abundant, and even in houses of 
men of wealth paint was used sparingly, and in many cases not at 
all. The dress of the inhabitants was mainly domestic, and when 
imported goods were used, a single suit of broadcloth or a dress of 
silk lasted for a number of years. Before eighteen hundred and 
fifteen four wheeled carriages were rare, and were destitute of orna- 
ments ; the family vehicle was a large and massive gig which could 
hold as great a weight as a single horse could pull. Before the 
close of eighteen hundred and fifteen a new era dawned.* The 
high prices of tobacco were soon seen in the dress of the people, in 
the elegance of their carriages, and in the beauty of their horses, in 
the rise of many large and handsome wood and brick houses, and 
in the improvement of the face of the country. Twelve years after 



*"From 1783 to the declaration of war in 1812 there did not pass a 
single year in which a war with Great'Britain was not a justifiable meas- 
ure. The retention of the British posts by that powerful nation, the 
failure to pay for the property carried off in defiance of the positive 
provisions of the capitulation at York, Great Britain's orders in council 
in Washington's administration, and her subsequent orders, were to the 
last degree annoying. The products of our agriculture were for long 
periods shut out from the sea; and one of our most prominent Southside 
statesmen, who was also a practical farmer, wrote from Washington 
that our prospect was so dark that the planters should cease the culti- 
vation of tobacco altogether and put their lands in grass." [MS. p. 67.] 



46 

1815, when I attended a commencement of the College,* the large 
collection of people of both sexes and of all ages who filled every 
place in the church, and who were clad in modern and costly ap- 
parel, and the number of gigs and carriages adorned with curtains 
and beautified with silver gilt, indicated the vast increase of the 
general wealth in that interval. 



*From Minutes of the Literary and Philosophical Society (MS.): 
September 26, 1827. — "The Literary and Philosophical Society at Hamp- 
den-Sidney College held its fourth Anniversary meeting in the philoso- 
phical apparatus room * * * Messrs. Charles Campbell, of Peters- 
burg [the historian], and Hugh B. Grigsby, of Norfolk, were elected 
members." 



LIBRPRY OF CONGRESS 



029 908 859 5 



